Average road speeds around the UK’s cities are painfully low, damaging economic growth and forcing people to endure long commutes or to miss out on the best jobs. In this report, Policy Exchange argues that road pricing could improve the lives of drivers as well as commanding public support.

Drivers rightly feel hard done by when Governments propose schemes to impose yet further taxes on them without showing the clear benefits that will result. Both polling and evidence from around the world show that drivers can support improvements to the systems by which they pay for the roads, but only when these schemes do not treat their welfare as an afterthought.

Successful road pricing experiments around the world show that it does not need to force drivers to shift to public transport or to cycle, but mostly leads to journeys being more evenly spread around the day. Those who can work from home or work flexible hours tend to shift their driving time.