Ken Livingstone could not have wished for better publicity than Porsche’s threat to take legal action over the increases to the congestion charge for ‘gas guzzlers’. It is a spectacular own goal by the car company.
Obviously, its bosses thought the issue would will play well with the minority who own the car but most people will see it as self interested nonsense. Clearly, the company’s PR managers did not think through the issue.
First, the protest publicises a scheme which, largely, plays well to most Londoners who either do not use their car much in central London or drive a smaller one. Secondly, it highlights the fact that Porsche cars have a high fuel consumption and are expensive to run. The attempt to suggest that Porsche owners will pay thousands of pounds per tonne of carbon, compared with the official price of £70, simply makes no sense. Livingstone is trying to stop pollution in central London which is already heavily polluted and therefore drastic measures are needed.
If they had been cleverer, Porsche would simply have sat on its hands, or possibly shrugged it off arguing that its drivers could well afford the extra. Porsche is not for the poor – now how’s that for a slogan.

Listening to the speaker from the Department for Transport, Jacqui Wilkinson, at the Greater London Assembly's Driving Change conference on what to do about congestion, I heard a new expression: she said that the Department was 'modally agnostic', meaning that it was not bothered about how we get there, just that we do.
This is quite extraordinary and explains how government policy has surrepticiously changed over the years. Gone is the view, expressed by dear old John Prescott, that getting people out of their cars is an aim of transport policy. Clearly now sustainability is not within the Department's purview.
I suppose this has been the case for quite a while. In the early days of Alistair Darling's tenure at transport, I asked him whether he should be encouraging rail use as opposed to travel by air for domestic journeys. He said that it was not up to him to make such decisions and the government had no role in trying to influence modal split. Moreover, he suggested it could not be done, which was clearly inaccurate since the government has all sorts of tools at its disposal, from planning to pricing.
Now though, it seems that modal agnosticism determines transport policy, or rather the lack of it. Modal agnosticism is, indeed, the abnegation of transport policy, a simple way of saying that there is nothing we can do about these motorists wanting to drive their cars. Indeed, a fellow blogger pressed Wilkinson, who remarkably is head of sustainable travel initiatives at the Department for Transport, on the matter after the conference and she told him that it takes time to change attitudes. That's hardly surprising given the absence of any sort of lead from the Department.

I’ve been asked to sum up ideas at a conference on congestion and I realise just what a difficult issue it is. Congestion is the result of a combination of economic success and transport policy failure. In a rational world, there would be sufficient incentives to ensure enough people did not jump in their cars every time they wanted to get somewhere, even to the local shops.
Congestion, in other words, is the result of market failure because road space is the last ‘good’ (in the economic sense) that is supplied free at the point of delivery and therefore is only rationed by queuing. A pure free market economist, therefore, would welcome pricing road space high enough to ensure a free flow of traffic everywhere. Oddly, that too would accord with an environmentalist, view, too where the aim would be to reduce the most damaging form of road transport, which are slow moving vehicles. The problem, however, gets more complex because once roads become clearer, more people would be attracted onto them and they may not be particularly price sensitive.
Other than road charging, there are other ways of reducing congestion. Providing more roads space, obviously, is one but that is impossible in urban environments today, both politically and practically. Reallocating road space is another, as with bus lanes. The theory, there, is that since more people travel on a bus, then it is right for the bus to be allocated extra space. However, in purely rational terms, this does not quite work, as the bus lane remains unoccupied for a large proportion of the time.
In a way, the only solution is to start from scratch. If one were developing a new city, surely the centre would be pedestrian only, with regular and frequent buses, trams and trains bringing people there. Deliveries would be allowed for a couple of hours early in the morning but there would be no place for private cars. A rational approach to congestion, therefore, would move in that direction over time, gradually squeezing cars out of city centres.
That leaves, however, an even more intractable problem over what to do with roads in suburban areas. These are just a few initial thoughts and any others from blog readers would be most welcome!