Congestion charges haven't taken hold in CEE, but official support is a key first step
By Greg Spencer
The concept of urban road charging, now as ever, remains a political pipe bomb, one that can vaporise the careers of any city mayor who dares touch it. Some would argue that road-use charges would be an especially hard sell in Central and Eastern Europe, where people, for historical reasons, are loath to give up democratic freedoms on collectivist grounds.
However, a few cities in the former socialist camp are pushing forward, albeit slowly and cautiously, with congestion charging schemes along the lines of those adopted fairly recently in central London and Stockholm.
In Lithuania and Latvia, where car ownership has grown more dramatically than anywhere else in Europe (167 and 142 percent, respectively, from 1990-2004, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit), congestion charging has won over the mayors of capital cities.
Latvia's capital Riga already has a charge for entry into a small part of its historic centre, both to protect buildings from pollution and to enhance walkability for tourists. But city mayor Janis Birks wants to curtail car access to an even wider area to address the larger problem of congestion. A feasibility study is underway, although a trial run has been postponed from an originally scheduled starting date in April, according to Janis Lagzdons, an economist working for the Riga City Council. "Now I'm not sure when it will begin," he says.
In the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, two consecutive mayors have backed a congestion charge proposal for their historic city centre. They see it as one possible antidote to the routine deluge of commuters that doubles the city's population from 500,000 to 1 million each workday.
However, the city needs legislative support at the national level to enforce such a charge, according to Mindaugas Laucius, deputy director of the Vilnius Public Transport Agency. Laucius says that prospects could improve with elections coming up later this year, but there's no certainty.
Congestion charging has been under discussion for at least two years in Prague, which has a higher rate of car ownership (one for every two residents) than 80 percent of European cities. Recently, the city government declared that it would implement a pilot road-use scheme by the end of 2009. In the meantime, according to city information officer Frantisek Balogh, administrative staff are working on a map of the charging area, carrying out a preliminary strategy study and setting formal goals. The Czech government has proved helpful in raising the statutory ceiling for road-use fees from CZK 20 to CZK 100 (EUR .80 to EUR 4); however, the Prague Mayor's Office still considers national legislation inadequate for efficient implementation of the system.
During a recent conference in Amsterdam, city transport planners and other professionals came together for a perennial meeting of Curacao, an EC-sponsored project devoted to road-user charging. During the project's two and a half years, the group has come up with a boatload of advice that could help cities bring their proposals to fruition: things like keeping the scheme relatively simple, making sure good transport alternatives exist before road charging begins, and promoting charges as a way to fund transport improvements.
The single biggest obstacle, it is agreed, is political acceptance. Road tolls are extremely difficult to sell to voters, and very few city administrations in Europe, or even worldwide, have managed to do it. However, in a few towns here in CEE, mayors have stuck their necks out on the issue and they've still got their heads. This is good news for city dwellers.
