From the BBC:
Journeys on the westbound carriageway on the Prince of Wales Bridge have increased by 16% in the year since the tolls were removed.
An average of more than 39,000 journeys are being made each day, up from less than 34,000 per day in 2018 when the £5.60 charge was still in place. Highways England said traffic rose by about 32% on the M48 Bridge, but exact figures were not available.
All those journeys mean more economic activity and so on. Tolls mean income for the bridge owner and and equal and opposite cost to motorists, so that is just a transfer of wealth and cancels out. Tolls also depress economic activity, so scrapping them is a clear win overall. Which is why I don't like tolls.
The bad news is, the value of that extra economic activity in south Wales and Bristol largely goes into higher land values, so the total rent collected i.e. land rent + tolls, stays the same.
This bit is interesting:
In the past two years the eastbound carriageway had seen a daily average of 3,000 more journeys than the westbound carriageway, where the tolls applied.
But after the removals of the tolls, the difference has fallen to about 1,000 journeys more eastbound per day since the tolls were removed, with an average of 40,364 trips from Wales to England in 2019.
How is this sustainable? To get from south Wales to Bristol, you have to take one of the two toll bridges, so the number of journeys each way should be the same.
One possible answer is that 1,000 people emigrate from Wales permanently each day, but that can't be right because Wales would be empty by now.
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10 comments:
“All those journeys mean more economic activity and so on. Tolls mean income for the bridge owner and and equal and opposite cost to motorists, so that is just a transfer of wealth and cancels out. Tolls also depress economic activity, so scrapping them is a clear win overall. Which is why I don't like tolls.
The bad news is, the value of that extra economic activity in south Wales and Bristol largely goes into higher land values, so the total rent collected i.e. land rent + tolls, stays the same.”
Most interesting. How are bridges to be funded then?
JH, bridges are just suspended roads. Should be funded same way as all roads, i.e. out of general taxation.
The government gets its money back many times over in fuel duty and could get even more if it taxed resulting land values.
... that means lower taxes on economic activity, which means more economic activity, which means higher land values etc in a virtuous circle.
Some years ago in London there was a tollbar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted on so large a proportion of their earnings appealed to the public conscience, an agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the ratepayers the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week. Within a very short period from that time the rents on the south side of the river were found to have advanced by about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted. And a friend of mine was telling me the other day that in the parish of Southwark about £350 a year, roughly speaking, was given away in doles of bread by charitable people in connection with one of the churches, and as a consequence of this the competition for small houses, but more particularly for single-roomed tenements, is, we are told, so great that rents are considerably higher than in the neighbouring district. All goes back to the land, and the landowner, who in many cases, in most cases, is a worthy person utterly unconscious of the character of the methods by which he is enriched, is enabled with resistless strength to absorb to himself a share of almost every public and every private benefit, however important or however pitiful those benefits may be.
- from "The People's Rights" Churchill 1909
Does anyone ever listen?
"How is this sustainable? To get from south Wales to Bristol, you have to take one of the two toll bridges, so the number of journeys each way should be the same."
Don't forget that there are other routes from England to South Wales, such as the A48 from Gloucester (IIRC the usual route used before the first Severn Bridge was built) or the M50 and A40 (the M50 also predates the Severn Bridges, and probably not have been built otherwise).
Perhaps when the tolls were in operation, motorists who would use the Severn Bridges for eastbound journeys would use one of these alternative routes for westbound journeys, and some clearly stayed in this habit even after the tolls were scrapped.
P, no, nobody listens. However obvious, however many times this happens, people pretend it didn't.
GC, of course that is the answer. But it's a heck of a long way round, and a waste of time and petrol. Another argument against tolls, it distorts behaviour for the worse.
"But it's a heck of a long way round, and a waste of time and petrol."
There are quite a few destinations in England where, travelling from Wales, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other which route you take and vice versa. Also, if you had to go to Gloucester and then on to Chepstow and then back to Bristol, in the old days it would have made sense to do Gloucester first. Now that the bridges are free, you could go either way, but if you are in the habit of going anti-clockwise, you would presumably stick to that route.
Typical Dept of Transport cockup. The Billy Goats Gruff actually wanted the Trolls removed.
The Dartford crossing toll has been renamed the Dartford crossing "Conjestion Charge", flippin Cheek.
Dinero. Not not cheek. Irony. It's always congested.
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