Hi. I'm here to talk about congestion, namely road congestion.

In London, the day they turned the congestion pricing on, there was a 25 percent decrease in congestion overnight, and that's persisted for the four years in which they've been doing congestion pricing.

Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon.

You really reduce congestion quite substantially.

The first day with the congestion charges looked like this.

This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it.

They're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along.

They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel.

The demand for parking, of course, is down, congestion and the CO2 emissions.

So, the last example of this is congestion pricing, very famously done in London.

Whatever happens with congestion pricing and those technologies will be happening with road pricing.

And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion.

So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things.

Congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world and is, again, wirelessly enabled.

If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think.

This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this.

Traffic congestion caused by tourism can have a serious impact on local quality of life, requiring effective management solutions.

And what congestion pricing is is that it's a technology trial and a psychological trial for something called road pricing.

But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more.

Indeed, research programs led by defense industries have already changed our lives, giving us the jet engine, the Internet, and satellite navigation. In the future, technology developed for military aerial surveillance could have major civilian benefits for example, helping to control traffic and reduce road congestion, and assisting in the dispatch of rescue teams and humanitarian assistance.

Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2.

Wrong again. It's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm, and we basically have the same low traffic levels still.

So, I want to move now to the second part of my story, which is when are we going to start doing this congestion pricing? Road pricing is coming.

And why is this going to happen? Because we're going to do congestion pricing, we are going to do road tolls, gas taxes are going to become road pricing.

Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly.

So there's no control there's no control group.

Sometimes instead of Control Z, we actually have zero control.

When they control their brain, they can control their pain.

Now, Stockholm is a medium sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges narrow bridges, old bridges which means lots of road congestion.

Control Structures

Control Structures

Classrooom control

Control Structures

Control Structures

Control orders

Border control

Import control

Export control

Movement Control

(a) Control

Arms control

Border control

Internal control

But, as has been demonstrated in areas like air pollution, traffic congestion, spectrum allocation, and tobacco consumption, market mechanisms are often the best way for governments to address such failures. So why are such mechanisms now in retreat?

Fortunately, in either biological control or even natural control, resistance is extremely rare.