Fuel and vehicle excise duty should be scrapped and replaced with a distance based road charge that reflects the environmental impact of each car being driven, according to the winner of the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize who was named last Thursday.

 

Hungarian born transport planner Gergely Raccuja MCIHT, who works for Amey, beat four other finalists in the competition to find ways of paying for better, safer and more reliable roads. His entry ‘Paying for road use could be miles better’ argues that the lighter and cleaner your vehicle, the less you should pay.

 

He proposes that insurers collect the charge and that proceeds are ringfenced for spending on both local and national highways. A pothole free Britain could be possible, he suggests, within five years. His submission was supported by the RAC Foundation.

 

“I am over the moon!” Gergely said after his win. “The key to the entry was to keep things simple, yet come up with an answer that was sophisticated enough to deal with an upheaval in cars and road transport which hasn’t been seen since the introduction of the motor car well over a century ago. I hope I can persuade our politicians too that everything to do with our roads could be better.”

 

RAC Foundation director Steve Gooding added: “To be involved in this winning entry has been a privilege, but the really crucial thing is what happens next. Even if policy makers aren’t immediately persuaded by our arguments they know the clock is ticking for them to show they have got a plan that offers the country’s tens of millions of drivers a fair deal and keeps the country moving in increasingly challenging times.”

 

Prize founder Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise said: “Policymakers can learn much from this year’s prize, and I hope they will take forward solutions to solve one of the greatest infrastructure challenges of modern times.”

 

The four other finalists for the prize included Edmund King of the AA and his wife Deirdre who proposed a pricing system that charges drivers beyond an initial 3000 free road miles each year.

 

Lawyer Catriona Brown put forward the case for a new ‘stepped approach’ to road pricing called ‘TForward’; a team from Volterra Partners and Jacobs led by Paul Buchanan proposed a system that makes charges and journey times clear in advance and compensates for delays; and academic and planning specialists Jamye Harrison and Russell King suggested a customer led demand management idea to encourage people to switch to pricing in return for a cut in fuel duty.