Transcriber: Matti Jääaro Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
There're a lot of problems with the transport system
and I'm going to talk about one of them,
namely congestion.
Well, as you've heard, congestion
is a major nuisance to all of us.
Loss of time means loss of production
and loss of time that we could use to do more fun things,
welfare basically.
Production, leisure, or whatever you want to do.
The thing about congestion is that
we need to do something about it.
All urban areas suffer from congestion.
It's just a basic fact of life.
There just isn't more space to build more roads on,
because urban space is confined and the [land]
is more valuable to do other things
than just putting asphalt on it.
So what do you do with them?
Well, the natural reaction for most humans
would be to tell these drivers to be somewhere else.
They should do something else.
They should go by public transport instead.
They should travel at other times perhaps.
To other destinations.
And transport planners, they are like most humans,
prone to telling other people what to do instead.
It's a natural reaction, especially if you are a transport planner.
Goes with the word: "Transport Planner".
You plan what people should do instead.
Now, let me tell you a story about planning.
At the time when the Berlin wall fell
1989, 1990 somewhere --
an urban planner in London got a strange phone call
from a college in Moscow.
"Hi, this is Vladimir,
I'm from Moscow, and we have this slight problem
trying to convert ourselves into a market economy,
and I'd like to talk to the person that's in charge
of London's bread supply.
Who is in charge of London's bread supply?"
And the urban planner in London was like
"I don't know, I mean,
no one I suppose."
"But someone must be in charge! It's a very
complex social problem, delivering all those breads
to all of London people and I hear
you have lots of good bread in London."
"Yes, we do, but no one is in charge."
"No one is in charge?"
"No, no one is in charge."
"Ah, I have to think about that".
And that's a very deep insight.
No one is in charge.
You just put the incentives and the nudges into place,
and the social system will organize itself.
That's the power of self organizing complex social systems.
No one really plans this.
No one can grasp all the details
of the London bread supply chain system.
But it works anyway.
And if that insight had been in place
in say, the Soviet Union 1920,
lots of the horrors of the 20th century
could have been avoided.
The power of a self organizing system
rather than trying to plan a complex system.
So, if you are a transport planner,
you shouldn't exactly in detail plan
what people should do instead.
That's where congestion pricing goes in.
The idea of congestion pricing
is to tell, to nudge people away
from the bad option.
"Don't drive your car at that particular bottleneck,
during rush hour. Do something else."
At least part of you do something else.
What you do, I don't really care,
I don't really need to know what you do instead.
You can go by public transport if you want to,
another time perhaps, another destination, another road.
When solving complex social problems:
Don't plan the details.
Give nudges, give incentives
and people will figure out how to adapt
to this new framework, to this new incentive.
This is a map of Stockholm.
And as you can see most of the valuable land
in the urban core is used for other purposes than roads.
We have lots of water,
which makes the congestion problems even worse
and there are a number of bottlenecks
on the bridges leading into the inner city.
Congestions develop and then spread out
across these blue lines which are roads.
Here is the nudge:
Why don't we just put a fairly small charge
on the people going there through rush hours,
1 or 2 euros or so, through the bottlenecks,
like this, the red dots there.
1 or 2 euros, that's not a significant
amount of money when you compare it to
the running costs of the cars, the parking cost,
the purchasing cost of the cars,
and the time cost.
So why would that really affect anyone?
You would perhaps affect,
maybe one or two percent of the car drivers
would choose something else.
But you would be wrong.
What happened was that 20% of the cars disappeared.
20%, that's fairly good,
but there's still 80% left of the congestion, right?
Now, the thing is that that's also wrong,
because traffic is a non-linear phenomenon.
Once you get above the capacity threshold,
each car you add, adds non-linearly
very very fast to the congestion.
It also works the other way around.
When you reduce traffic,
you can get dramatic effects on congestion.
Congestion charging was introduced in Stockholm
on January 3rd, 2006.
This is January 2nd on one of the major arterials here.
If you reduce 20% of the traffic on this road
you get the situation on January 3rd
the first day of the congestion charges,
and it looked like this.
This is what happens when you take away
20% of traffic.
Maybe it works one day.
Don't people adapt?
That's what you said, right?
So drivers will just get used to it
and after a while they all come back.
Wrong.
We are now six years, more than six years actually,
after the introduction of congestion charges
and we still have roughly the same amount of traffic,
that we had that January 3rd, 2006.
But you see there's a gap here, in 2007.
Yes, because we had this wonderful, scientific
opportunity that the politicians in all their magnificent wisdom
decided to abolish the congestion charges again,
and then re-introducing it, giving us twice,
a scientifically controlled experiment with congestion charges.
(Laughter)
And personally, I'd like to remove it once a year
and then re-introducing it
just for the scientific fun of it.
But they wouldn't let me do that,
so we'll just have to do with this twice experiment.
But it sort of captures the essence of it.
So, what happens then?
Well, as I said, it was introduced as a trial, first.
This is July 31st.
This is the last day with the congestion charges in place.
In the middle of the summer,
this is the same place, the same time,
but now it's summertime, so it's much lighter.
August 1st was the first day without congestion charges
and it looked like this.
You have to admire the drivers,
they adapt so quickly.
The first day, and they all came back again.
Well, basically only 15 - 20% of them came back
but it was more than enough
to create those marvelous queues again.
And what did 2007 then look like,
if you look at it on a year basis?
It looked like this.
Basically all the cars were back again,
but not quite all of them.
Of these 20% that disappeared,
5% never came back.
So 5% of those drivers who had changed to something else,
another destination, another mode or something,
they decided that, "I actually like my new
travel pattern better than I did my old one."
That's also the power of information,
of trying something new.
And the power of habit formation.
When you try something, you establish a new travel habit,
and it sticks. It works both ways.
You stick as a car driver,
and you also stick as a non-car driver.
But, OK, we sort of knew that.
That traffic was non-linear, that people would adapt,
but what we didn't know was this:
People liked it.
I mean, when you introduce a price on something
people don't generally stand up and applaud.
They hate you instead.
So when this idea was introduced,
70% were vehemently against this.
What happened when this was introduced
was that support increased.
People didn't get more angry, they actually got more happy.
We are now back here, spring 2011,
and around 70% are in favor of keeping the congestion charges.
They're actually in favor of keeping a price
on something that used to be free.
This is kind of strange.
Why might that be?
Well, let's think about it this way:
Who changed?
I mean, these 20% that chose something else,
they must be unhappy, right?
OK, so let's track them down.
So we did this huge survey
where we tried to track people down.
Who changed?
We interviewed people before and afterwards
and compared travel before and afterwards,
and asked the question: "Who changed,
and where did they go?"
It turned out, they don't know themselves.
You can't track people down.
Most car drivers that you interview
are just completely certain that they travel
in exactly the same way as they did before.
But apparently they don't.
And why is that?
Well, one of the reasons is that travel patterns
are less stable than you might like to think.
People change all the time,
the world is changing,
and you make new decisions each day.
And one of these decisions is slightly "nudged"
into the non-rush hour car driving direction.
That's enough to make this 20% direction.
OK, so people changed their minds then.
So who changed their mind?
Who changed their opinion, and why did they change?
It could be good to know for politicians.
It turns out that more than half of them
believe that they didn't change their mind.
If you ask people: "What did you believe
about congestion pricing back in 2005?",
somewhere around 50 or 60% say,
"Oh, I've always been in favor of congestion charges."
Well, you might think so, but you were not,
because we tracked you down.
So this is a strange thing.
And it is also a very human phenomenon.
We are very prone to sticking to one opinion.
And if we in one case change our opinion,
we don't really like this sort of conflict
between our former self and our current self.
But the heroes of this story,
are actually the ones that made
the conscious effort to change their opinion,
because that's a very hard thing for a human to do.
We tend to stick to our opinion despite the fact of evidence.
The heroes of this story are the ones
that actually had one opinion,
looked at the evidence,
said "Maybe I should change my mind", because
that's among the most difficult things a human can do.
As I said, if you want to do great things,
don't tell people how to adapt.
Just nudge them away from the bad options.
And, if you do it right,
they might even like it.
Thank you.
(Applause)