The Effect of Fairness on individual’s Acceptability of Road Pricing Policy

Abstract

The dramatic growing of private vehicles ownership results in heavy traffic congestion and serious environmental pollution in the city, such as air pollution and annoying noise. Professional urban planning experts have attempted to achieve the target mentioned above by adjusting current land use. However, adjusting land use always takes a long time. At the moment, the advanced countries in Europe and the United States have been already paying attention to traffic demand management (TDM) in order to solve these environmental problems and achieve the target of building a sustainable living environment. While road pricing (RP) is generally regarded as one of the most effective measures of TDM, its poor acceptability has been the greatest impediment to its implementation. Japanese scholars proposed the parking deposit system (PDS) as an alternative RP scheme to improve the public acceptance. In view of the above, this study takes a local commercial district of Tainan City as the study area where the data of visitors driving private vehicle are collected by a stated preference questionnaire. Because the acceptances of two policies are considered to be correlated in this study, the choice behavior model of acceptance is established by using bivariate binary probit model. This study also considered that different groups may hold different attitudes, so respondents were separated into two groups according to their consciousness of fairness. Therefore, the choice behavior model of acceptance of fair group and unfair group are built and compared. The result of model estimation has several good implications for the proposal of environmental policy and traffic demand management measures. It indicates that the most important thing that people really care about is cost. That means individual’s behavior can be adjusted by charge schemes. On the other hand, the result of social interaction equilibrium shows that the difference can be obviously distinguished from different groups, so it is recognized that the approval probability of the fair group is higher than the unfair group. The marginal effects of estimated coefficients are also discussed in this study.