Social unacceptability of urban road pricing: Manchester, the toll and the democracy By Laurent Fouillé, Sociologist, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, École des Mines de Nantes and IRSTV (Research Institute on Urban Sciences and Techniques) 4 rue Alfred Kastler BP 20722 44307 Nantes Cedex 3 laurent.fouille@mines-nantes.fr
Abstract This paper analyses the vast controversy aroused by the Greater Manchester project to implement a congestion charge. Between 2005 and 2008, a plan had progressively emerged to build the biggest worldwide urban road pricing scheme constituted by a double ring, the larger one along the M60 orbital motorway, which meant a 128 km² tolled area. This very unpopular device was expected to finance part of a £3 billion massive investment plan for public transport: the “Metrolink Big Bang expansion”. Finally, a local referendum irreversibly erased this program. Nonetheless, the debates and the failure’s analysis show us how citizensmotorists refuse to be reduced only to their economic agent status. It demonstrates, if necessary, the public unacceptability of a traffic regulation policy strictly based on price and market tools. Moreover, this peculiar case forces us to criticize the “package strategy” which consists in linking investments-carrot with toll-stick. Is a carrot big enough to justify stick use? Is a stick strong enough to harvest tons of carrots? It also enlightens on the complicated trade-off process between a central government, local representatives and their citizens/voters. The Britain specific institutional architecture lets us see how local representatives are unable to solve the double bind which they are facing: central government urging them to introduce a travel demand management scheme and citizens absolutely refusing it. It seems then impossible to implement an urban road pricing scheme in a democratic way. To depict this localized public issue, we employed the particularly fitted methodology developed by Bruno Latour with his students and known as socio-technical controversy analysis. It consists in identifying the key actors, their arguments, in mapping their network and document their dynamics with timeline, board, map... It supposes to consider a controversy in action as a hot topic, an uncompleted process full of uncertainties. That’s what we made here, monitoring the controversy since the year 2007 and visiting Manchester in March 2009. We collected more than 500 articles of the local newspaper Manchester Evening News. We realized several website network maps, a semantic content analysis, an interactive time-line and an automated word cloud. We also interviewed three key participants in a more conventional comprehensive approach. The present article summarizes and translates a chapter of a PhD thesis entitled Car attachment tested. Study of devices to detach motorists and to recompose mobilities, in which urban road pricing is conceived as an economic barrier aiming to detach motorists from their cars by increasing the price of driving in cities. “ They have to pay more to be impeded in their driving habits” can be a good script to express this device’s intention. It is subtended by a behavior’s price elasticity hypothesis, itself implying a narrow definition of motorists as pure homo economicus. Manchester controversy suggests that they are probably more than that. Governing a republic of drivers is surely more complicated than a mere definition of the fair price.
Keywords: Congestion charge – Controversy – package strategy – motorized citizen