E-tolls – any tolls, really – are a clumsy version of what will eventually become a bigger part of our lives, and this is already starting to happen around us.
In its crude form you could think of it as the “pay-as-you-go” principle, where you pay for how much you use something rather than paying a flat fee.
There are plenty of examples of things that we pay for according to how much we use, like electricity or water, or the fuel levy that many argue is more efficient and equitable than tolls as a way of collecting money to pay for roads (if it were actually used for roads). But there are very few examples of things that use payment to try to alter behaviour as a way to improve the effectiveness of town or city infrastructure.
This is a problem because a lot of our infrastructure is built to accommodate the short periods of the day when we all want to do the same things, whether it’s driving to work or cooking supper. By building pipelines, roads and power stations for these peaks, the city ends up with unused capacity for the other 80 percent or 90 percent of the 24-hour day, which is financially wasteful.
Exactly how government collects money to pay for infrastructure is a side issue. The fundamental problem is that there simply is not enough money to be squeezed out of us, regardless of how they try to do it. We face an almost insurmountable challenge in providing infrastructure for our growing cities. But it’s only as bad as it is because so much of the infrastructure is underutilised.
Cities have spent a long time evolving in the wrong direction, and now we need to figure out how to change course. Some are beginning to explore ways to use infrastructure more efficiently; for example, by encouraging more people to live and work along public transport corridors so that public transport is used more effectively in both directions. But it will take decades for this strategy to make a difference.
As residents we face the same challenge with our personal assets. We buy cars, washing machines and other appliances that spend most of their time sitting idle. This is where companies are jumping in, with the likes of AirBnB allowing us to share these resources in what has become known as the sharing economy.
Eventually, when car-share schemes like ZipCar let us pay for travel by the hour, it can be cheaper than owning a car. And Uber is simply an early adopter of technology that will let us apply this principle to unimagined areas. Not just changing our model of ownership, but reorganising our lives around services that are delivered differently. City Power Johannesburg has started with load-limiting as a way to encourage people to use electricity during periods when there is less demand for it. As this principle spreads beyond electricity, we will change the way we run our homes.
And it doesn’t have to be hi-tech. Cities can support more affordable lifestyles; for example, by arranging houses with shared facilities around a courtyard so that not every family has to buy a stove and a washing machine.
I have written before that efficiency is overrated. Firstly because things are designed to be as close to failure as safely permissible, with very little chance of recovery when things do go wrong. (A dam is engineered to avoid failure under predicted conditions, but if it does fail, there is no back-up system to protect people downstream.) And secondly because design is not efficient at all in the sense that I have been saying here.
The challenge is to provide both efficiency and the redundancy of back-up systems. These sound like opposing needs, but they are applied differently. Efficiency is for cost-effectiveness; redundancy is to ensure that there are alternatives to prevent failure, or to reduce the impact of failure, or even to create new opportunities.
This duality needs to be applied not only to, say, the strength of a bridge, but also to the way we use the bridge (could it be designed as a place for selling goods?). It’s about how cities manage growth while allowing residents the choices needed to extract more benefit from infrastructure. Idle infrastructure should be treated as a system failure.
@carbonsmart