News - Transport

A majority of car trips in the ACT are made with a driver and no passengers. A high proportion of bus trips have near empty buses.

If the number of people per trip per vehicle was increased we would reduce pollution, reduce traffic congestion and ease parking. It is estimated that each 1% increase in ACT vehicle occupancy will save the community $5M dollars per year. Doubling the average number of people in each vehicle will save the community $500M dollars each year.

One way of doing this would be to set up a voluntary system where people could purchase electronic vouchers. Vouchers would pay for trips in a car or bus. Car drivers would register their cars as being available for pooling or for local trips. Anyone who used the system would have to identify themselves on each trip and car owners would choose who they allowed to travel in their cars. That is, a person wishing to travel somewhere in someone else's car would register their wish and car owners would choose anonymously whether to take the person. When vouchers were used then they would be replaced with vouchers from the public purse.

Vouchers would only be usable for transport or for other ways of reducing greenhouse gases. Thus car owners who took passengers and earned more vouchers than they could use could either sell their vouchers at a discount to someone who could use them or use them on investing in green house gas reductions.

The cost of such a system would be of the order of 5% of turnover. Thus the community return on investment would be 20 to 1 as it takes advantage of unused transport capacity. Abuse of the system would be easy to detect and would be policed by banning abusers from the system.

< Prev		Next >