Abstract
Studies of cities that have successfully shifted demand from cars to more sustainable modes suggest that coordinated packages of mutually reinforcing policy instruments are needed. Congestion charges and parking fees can be important parts of such packages. This paper examines the introduction of welfare-optimal congestion charges and parking fees in a model calibrated to Uppsala, a small city in Sweden. These effects are modeled with a simple transport demand model for the welfare optimization of parking fees, congestion charges, and public transport provision. The results suggest that welfare-optimal congestion charges in Uppsala are as high as EUR 2.8 in peak hours and EUR 1.4 in off-peak hours. A rough cost–benefit analysis shows that the introduction of congestion charges in Uppsala is welfare improving if the operating costs of congestion charges are proportional to city population size. In the main scenarios, optimal congestion charges and parking fees reduce the number of car trips by 10% and 7%, respectively. The model can be used to assess when it is worthwhile to introduce congestion pricing.
Highlights
There has been a long-standing hope that building smarter cities can reduce car use substantially, reducing carbon emissions and making the city more attractive
This paper aims to examine the introduction of welfare optimal congestion charges and parking fees in a model calibrated to Uppsala, a small city in Sweden
The results suggest that welfare optimal congestion charges in Uppsala are as high as EUR 3.0 in the peak hours and EUR 1.5 in the off-peak
Summary
There has been a long-standing hope that building smarter cities can reduce car use substantially, reducing carbon emissions and making the city more attractive. North American studies (e.g. Ewing and Cervero 2010 or Stevens 2017) have focused on building cities more compact and studying how such development could reduce car use They found that the “magnitude of that reduction is generally small” (Stevens 2017, p 15). Buehler et al (2017) showed that the share of car trips has been reduced in five large German speaking cities and provided an in-depth description of a wide range of policies, to which these effects may be attributable They emphasized that “coordinated packages of mutually reinforcing transport and land use policies” are important to achieve these effects and that parking policies and parking management is likely to have been the most important of the car-restrictive policies for reducing the share of car trips In line with this idea we will study the role of parking fees as a substitute or complement to congestion charges
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