I really hate the local number-coding scheme, which bans cars with certain license plate numbers from being on the road on a specific day of the week. I hate it because I dislike commuting and none of the places I need to go to are within walking distance. I hate the fact that various cities have their own version of the scheme, such that I am often unsure whether or not it is legal for me to drive to a meeting in a given city on a given day. Most of all, I hate it because I don’t think it’s actually doing its job.
I’ve been recently reading the very excellent Naked Economics, which mentions a similar scheme attempted in Mexico back in the early 90s. The driving force behind the scheme was to reduce vehicle emissions around Mexico City (which is one of the most polluted cities in the world). On paper, the idea sounded great. Vehicles with plates ending in a given number(s) could not be used on a given day, thus reducing the volume of traffic by as much as 20%. However, it turns out the idea had an opposite effect in the long run.
Sayeth author Charles Wheelan:
As would be expected, many people did not like the inconvenience of having their driving days limited. They reacted in a way that analysts may have predicted but did not. Families who could afford to buy a second car bought one, or simply kept their old car when buying a new one, so that they would always have one car that could be driven on any given day. This proved to be worse for emissions than no policy at all, since the proportion of old cars on the road went up, and old cars are dirtier than new cars. The net effect of the policy change was to put more polluting cars on the road, not fewer. A 1995 study found that overall gas consumption had increased. The policy was later dropped in favor of a mandatory emissions test.
This is the same behaviour exhibited by many middle-class families here in the Philippines. Instead of buying a new car to replace an old one, we keep the old car around as a backup. One of my close friend’s family has more cars than they have driver’s licenses, because nobody wants to be stuck without transportation at a crucial time.
The difference though is that emissions reduction was only one of the reasons for the policy. The Philippine government implemented it in an effort to reduce the physical number of cars on the road as well. After reading the Mexico experience though, I’m wondering if that is really what happened. I started driving a few years after the policy was implemented in this country so my personal experience is limited at best, but I don’t believe that the traffic situation has markedly improved (at least, not since I started driving back in 2000).
One of the things Naked Economics has been teaching me is that the best way to get people to do what you (the prevailing authority) want is to incentivize them in some fashion. With that in mind, I think the best way to reduce the number of vehicles on the road is to increase the cost of parking. Why parking fees, and not gasoline? Because you want to discourage private cars while encouraging public transportation. Increasing the cost of parking makes people think twice about taking their cars to work or taking several cars instead of jamming themselves into a single vehicle.
What I don’t really know is exactly how much the cost should be. On the average, it costs about PhP80 to park for a whole day in any of the business districts, and I think increasing it to say, PhP100 would have a very powerful effect on the average driver. The current coding scheme is flawed because it doesn’t really lessen the number of drivers; it just heightens the need to buy more cars.