Introduction to the feature issue on design and evaluation of road network pricing

Abstract

Several pricing strategies are increasingly considered worldwide as possible options to mitigate the negative externalities of traffic congestion in urban networks, manage travel demand and improve urban living conditions. Despite the annotated beneficial impacts of congestion pricing schemes on network performance and social welfare, a range of problems still hinder many decision makers to apply these schemes in practice. Such problems typically relate to technical issues as well as the use of toll revenues to address equity concerns and increase public acceptability. At the same time, the plans for upgrading, expanding or constructing new road transport infrastructure to enhance regional accessibility and economic development are hampered by limitations on the allocation of available public funds. This situation has motivated the development of suitable privatization mechanisms to allow the construction and operation of road infrastructure from profit-maximizing private firms, usually subject to constraints imposed by governments/regulators. The involvement of many different actors with diverse, often conflicting, goals and constraints, and complexities associated with realistic network implementation raise the need for devising innovative design and evaluation approaches for alternative road pricing schemes. This feature issue of Netnomics brings together original research, methods, state-of-the-art surveys and applications of pricing strategies in test and real-world road networks. Tsekeris and Voβ [6] provides an in-depth extensive review of the state-ofthe-art and describes methodological advances in the design and evaluation of road pricing. It stresses the need for considering a number of paradigm shifts from the two polar cases of marginal social cost pricing of traffic congestion and revenue-maximizing (monopolistic or competitive) private road pricing in