Smeed Report

The Smeed Report (titled Road Pricing: The Economic and Technical Possibilities) was a study into alternative methods of charging for road use, commissioned by the UK government between 1962 and 1964 led by R. J. Smeed. The report stopped short of an unqualified recommendation for road pricing but supported congestion pricing for busy road networks.

The team was led by R. J. Smeed, the deputy director of the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory and included 11 economists and engineers, including:

The taxation system in operating at the time was based on the Salter Report into road and rail transportation from 1933.

The principles laid down were that "The road user should pay the costs that he imposes upon others", namely the following:

The operational requirements should be the following:

The results of the radical study were reported into the then Ministry of Transport, indicating that the effect of speeding up congested traffic would benefit the country's economy by £100–£150M per annum. It would be possible and feasible to impose car user restraint strategies by charging through the metering of road usage, if the government had the will to do so.

Charging zones would be identified by clear signs on their boundaries; these could be electrical and thus be changed at various times of the day. A simple national colour-coded scheme could be used to indicate the charge rate in force at that time or to allow different charging zones to exist side-by side.

They recognised that traditional toll collection methods would not be practical in city centres, where the road layout had not been designed to provide natural gateways into the tow, and where the demolition and land required for toll booths or toll plazas would be unacceptable.

Instead, they investigated charging through a daily licence system, managed either by a remote wireless automatic identification of the vehicle, or by a meter mounted inside the vehicle, which could track both driving charges and parking.

They recommended a tamper-proof credit or pre-payment meter inside the car, as with the technology available at the time, any external recording mechanism would require expensive equipment for tracking and book keeping and threaten the privacy of the vehicle users they tracked. A single metering system could be used in any British city centre that chose to adopt a charging zones.

...
Wikipedia