Road Pricing Policy Research Articles

Route Divert Behavior in Jakarta Electronic Road Pricing Policy Implementation

The effectiveness of transportation demand management policy depends on how commuters respond to it. This study attempts to comprehend commuter behavior in choosing routes based on electronic road pricing (ERP) policy implementation on the Sudirman and Kuningan corridors. The experiments were conducted using the data collections from a stated preference experiment in which each commuter makes a route choice with an alternative representing a hypothetical situation with a combination of tariffs and travel time in ERP policy implementation. Logit models found that the individual and household variables influence route divert behavior. A commuter with a higher income or more family members living together is more likely to have less flexibility in diverting route. In addition, the distance of the trips affected their route divert behavior and influenced an individual trip chain constrained in timespace prism.

Influence of Parking Deposit System on Travel Mode Choice Behavior in Hanoi: A Latent Class Modeling Approach

To enhance social acceptance of road pricing policy, a parking deposit system (PDS) has been proposed in Japan to replace conventional congestion charging scheme. In the PDS, a full or partial of entry toll to the charging area is refunded to drivers who use parking facilities and/or have a business within the charged area. This paper investigates how the PDS affects travel mode choice behavior in Hanoi, which has been suffering from road congestion for years. Since the PDS has not been implemented in practice, a stated preference survey was conducted in 2013 and 932 SP cards from 233 persons were collected. To reflect the influence of heterogeneous responses of different persons, a latent-class travel mode choice model was estimated. Model estimation results confirm that the PDS only has a significant influence on motorcycle drivers.

The reciprocal relationship between policy debate and media coverage: The case of road pricing policy in the Netherlands

This study examined the changes in the media coverage of two road pricing schemes proposed in the Netherlands in the period 1998–2010, as well as the link between the media coverage and the policy debate. Both pricing proposals were debated for several years and neither was introduced. Our findings show that space allocation for type of overall tone (e.g. negative or positive towards a pricing proposal) and the range of issues and policy actors in the media coverage were very different for the two proposals, and for each proposal fluctuated greatly over time. Our analysis suggests that such a variation in the media coverage was a reflection of changes in the content of the policy debate (e.g. caused by the specific design features of pricing proposal under discussion, the different policy actors engaged in the debate and their messages about the proposal). This indicates that policymakers can influence the media coverage of road pricing policies to some extent by managing the policy debate. Our findings also show not only that changes in the content of the policy debate were reflected in the media coverage, but also that the media coverage influenced the policy debate: the statements or actions of policy actors received media coverage, which then in turn stimulated the policy debate. However, the influence of media on the policy debate was rather indirect, in that policy actors mostly reacted to the messages from other policy actors reported in the media and to a lesser extent to the media coverage itself.

Distinguishing the land use effects of road pricing based on the urban form attributes

This paper studies the effects of road pricing on land use under different development scenarios (business as usual scenario and transit oriented development scenario) by a quantitative method, which combines the integrated land use and transport interaction model (TRANUS model) with the scenario-planning techniques. Moreover, in order to further analyze the differences of the land use effects of road pricing on traffic analysis zones (TAZs) with different urban form attributes, a quantitative classification method combining factor analysis and cluster analysis is then used to quantitatively classify TAZs. The results demonstrate that the effects of road pricing on the land use of a specific region depend on the urban form attributes of the region. The higher the densities of employments and population, and better street design (high densities of street and intersections) and public transportation condition, the less the region is negatively affected by road pricing, and vice versa. More importantly, rail transit can alleviate the negative impact of road pricing on commercial development and population concentration of the region. Therefore, before introducing a road pricing policy, it is necessary to develop public transport system, especially rail transit.

Non-implementation of road pricing policy in the Netherlands: An application of the ‘Advocacy Coalition Framework’

The implementation of road pricing policies is dependent on political support for the policy. It is frequently argued that many pricing proposals fail to be implemented due to the opposition of one or a group of policy actors (e.g. political parties, interest groups). This study considers this issue and examines the reasons for non-implementation of proposals for Dutch road pricing policies by analysing the policy position changes of 26 major policy actors and the changes in consensus and conflict among these actors over a policy process of 16 years. The “Advocacy Coalition Framework” (ACF) is used as the theoretical lens. Our findings show that in the Netherlands non-implementation cannot be ascribed to only the opposition of one policy actor or to one group of policy actors, but rather to features of the Dutch political system/culture and complications peculiar to the road pricing subsystem (socio-cultural values related to mobility, complex design issues). We found that internal and external shocks, and policy-oriented learning affected the subsystem and alerted the power balance between pro-and anti-road pricing coalitions. However, these factors did not produce a major policy change, namely, the introduction of a road pricing scheme.

Simulation-based Optimization of Mixed Road Pricing Policies in a large Real-world Network

The joint optimization of various types of road pricing strategies for a large-scale real-world network is challenging. Dynamic network supply models can overcome this shortcoming, and provide more detailed information regarding the system performance. However, the computational burden of simulation is still a big challenge for the optimization. Utilizing a simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment model, this paper proposes a simulation-based optimization method to solve the mixed road pricing problem, which is characterized by expensive-to-evaluate and non-closed-form multi-objectives. The mixed road pricing problem is formulated to satisfy dynamic user equilibrium conditions. It enables to capture the time-varying network performance via dynamic traffic assignment. The simulation-based optimization method is successfully applied to the joint optimization of a variety of toll facilities in a real-world network of the Montgomery County in Maryland, i.e. an HOT lane, express toll lanes, and a toll road.

Comparison analysis on acceptability of road pricing policy between Jakarta and Nagoya

筆者らが行った名古屋で実施したロードプライシング（RP）の受容性に関する調査の結果では賛成率は40-50%であり，インドネシアの首都ジャカルタで実施した同様の調査でのRPの賛成率は70%以上と，他の都市と比較しても非常に高い．この違いは何が原因なのだろうか．本研究では，特に心理的要因に着目し，2つのデータを比較分析した．この結果，ジャカルタのほうが渋滞などの問題をひどいと感じており，RPによって問題を解決できるのではないかと考えていることが明らかとなった．一方，名古屋ではRPの効果を認めているものの，世間に受け入れられない，不公平な政策であると評価していることがわかった．名古屋と異なりジャカルタでは，他者の賛成率といった社会的相互作用の影響がないなどの特徴が明らかとなった．

An agent-based approach for road pricing: system-level performance and implications for drivers

Background: Road pricing is a useful mechanism to align private utility of drivers with a system-level measure of performance. Traffic simulation can be used to predict the impact of road pricing policies. The simulation is not a trivial task because traffic is a social system composed of different interacting entities. To tackle this complexity, agent-based approaches can be employed to model the behavior of the several actors in transportation systems. Methods: We model traffic as a multiagent system in which link manager agents employ a reinforcement learning scheme to determine road pricing policies in a road network. Drivers who traverse the road network are cost-minimizer agents with local information and different preferences regarding travel time and credits expenditure. Results: The vehicular flow achieved by our reinforcement learning approach for road pricing is close to a method where drivers have global information of the road network status to choose their routes. Our approach reaches its peak performance faster than a fixed pricing approach. Moreover, drivers’ welfare is greater when the variability of their preferences regarding minimization of travel time or credits expenditure is higher. Conclusions: Our experiments showed that the adoption of reinforcement learning for determining road pricing policies is a promising approach, even with limitations in the driver agent and link manager models.

The Latent Factors Behind the Urban Travel Behaviour

This research aims to explore the impact of latent variables, mirroring the users’ preferences, on the individual decision making process regarding the mode of transport. The paper describes the first results of an ongoing research activity, which derives from a pilot study carried out in Palermo.The authors have administered to a sample of travellers a questionnaire and they simulated the mode choice behaviour referring to the random utility theory. Then the transport demand over the entire area of Palermo has been studied in order to design the cordon pricing scenario with the application of an additional cost on private car dedicated to a selected area of the historic centre of Palermo. The results support the assumption that the design of a competitive public transport supply, using a road pricing policy, should pass through the complete understanding of the relationship between mode choice and latent constructs.

Use of Health Impact Assessment for Transportation Planning

A health impact assessment (HIA) is a tool that can be used to inform transportation planners of the potential health consequences of their decisions. Although dozens of transportation-related HIAs have been completed in the United States, the characteristics of these HIAs and the interactions between public health professionals and transportation decision makers in these HIAs have not been documented. A master list of completed HIAs was used to identify transportation-related HIAs. Seventy-three transportation-related HIAs conducted in 22 states between 2004 and 2013 were identified. The HIAs were conducted for projects such as road redevelopments, bridge replacements, and development of trails and public transit. Policies such as road pricing, transit service levels, speed limits, complete streets, and safe routes to schools were also assessed. Five HIAs in which substantial interactions between public health and transportation professionals took place during and after the HIA were examined in detail and included HIAs of the road pricing policy in San Francisco, California; a bridge replacement in Seattle, Washington; new transit lines in Baltimore, Maryland, and Portland, Oregon; and the BeltLine transit, trails, and parks project in Atlanta, Georgia. Recommendations from the HIAs led to changes in decisions in some cases and helped to raise awareness of health issues by transportation decision makers in all cases. HIAs are now used for many topics in transportation. The range of involvement of transportation decision makers in the conduct of HIAs varies. These case studies may serve as models for the conduct of future transportation-related HIAs, because the involvement of transportation agencies may increase the likelihood that an HIA will influence subsequent decisions.

Has the Dutch news media acted as a policy actor in the road pricing policy debate?

The media is seen as an important player in road pricing policy implementation processes. Yet, it is not clear whether the media is actually a policy actor, like politicians or interest groups, which pursues a particular policy positions. This paper empirically examines whether the Dutch news media was objective in its reporting of the Dutch road pricing policy debate (which took place between 1998 and 2010) or whether it acted as a policy actor through biased reporting. We applied Westerstahl’s Objectivity Framework to the media coverage by five leading national newspapers. Our main conclusion is that the Dutch news media was not objective and acted as a policy actor in the Dutch road pricing policy debate. Although all the newspapers violated objectivity to the same degree, they clearly adopted different policy positions. One popular newspaper was negative and the other mixed whereas all three quality newspapers were positive with the exception of one which sometimes inclined to a mixed position. All newspapers generally maintained the same position over the relatively long period of the road pricing debate.

Is road pricing effective in abating pollution? Evidence from Milan

We estimate the effect of a road pricing policy introduced in Milan in 2008 on concentrations of benzene, carbon monoxide, particulates, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide. We found a sizeable effect of the Ecopass on air quality in terms of reduction in the concentration of carbon monoxide and particulates a few days after its introduction, although this effect disappeared after only one week. We interpret these results as indicative of an inefficient policy design: motorbikes were not charged and the treated area is too limited to generate positive outcomes for the whole city. Further evidence from a natural experiment given by a temporary suspension of the charge in 2012 confirms our hypothesis on the incentives for motorbike usage.

Road pricing in the European Union: direct revenue transfer between countries

In 2011 the ‘Eurovignette’ directive on distance-based road pricing in Europe was finally passed by the European Parliament and the European Council. It will bring benefits to the environment and contribute towards financing the cost of maintaining road infrastructure, but wider effects are also expected. This study measures the transfer of revenue derived from the introduction of the Eurovignette directive using an OD trucks matrix and a Geographic Information System (GIS). A revenue transfer matrix is obtained reflecting the cost of the toll fees paid and collected by each country for the use of both its own roads and those of the other countries. From this matrix it is possible to know which countries will have positive or negative balances between revenue and payments as a consequence of introducing a common road pricing policy. The results obtained demonstrate that this revenue transfer between European countries will be highly asymmetrical, with a clear trend towards positive balances for central countries and negative balances for peripheral ones.

The acceptability of road pricing in Vienna: the preference patterns of car drivers

The acceptability of road pricing has attracted considerable attention among researchers over the last decade, as is evident in the amount of literature about transport and environmental economics. The general conclusion from these studies has been that there is low acceptability for road pricing among car users. In this paper, we add more knowledge to the existing literature by conducting an acceptability study of road pricing in Vienna, where such a study has never been conducted before. We used a replication study approach where a previous approach used in the EU research project AFFORD (acceptability of fiscal and financial measures and organisational requirements for demand management) was replicated for Vienna and further supplemented with a conjoint analysis. In order to examining whether the Vienna study confirms previous findings. We investigated the acceptability of two concrete policy packages factors influencing this acceptability, and preference patterns that can be used in designing a road pricing policy for Vienna. The survey reveals a higher acceptability if road pricing schemes lead to perceived personal benefits. According to the multivariate analyses, the “personal outcome expectations”, “social norm” and “perceived effectiveness” variables account for more than 50 % of the criterion variance and therefore these are the most influential factors. Road pricing schemes can be an effective transport management instrument for a city particularly if they are associated with direct investment in public transport and public infrastructure. Thus, personal benefits can be perceived more easily and direct effects can be expected.

Attitudes towards road pricing and environmental taxation among US and UK students

This study investigates the determinants of public acceptability of road pricing and environmental taxation policies. The strength and direction of causal paths between psychological determinants and the acceptability of these policies are measured with survey data from students in New Jersey, USA and London. The estimated models show that a number of well-established psychological determinants provide an explanation for the acceptability of both policies and in both locations despite various differences in the policy scenarios. Scenario fairness appears to be the most important direct determinant of acceptability in both countries. We further verify the effect of “specific trust in government” on scenario fairness and other direct determinants that indicate the important role of government performance for achieving acceptability for these measures. Our findings further suggest that awareness of wider environmental issues, such as climate change, can lead to the support of specific sustainable transport policies, such as road pricing, which do not address climate change issues directly.

Examining the linkages between electronic roadway tolling technologies and road pricing policy objectives

The surge of road pricing projects in the U.S. and around the globe over the past 15 years has been enabled by a variety of new communication and transportation technologies. While all of these technologies increase the efficiency of roadway tolling vis-à-vis manual collection, no “best” configuration has emerged. Rather, optimal configurations depend on the objectives of the tolling effort, such as facility type, geographic scope, desire to price externalities, integration with other operations, and so on. While such policy objectives for road pricing have been examined extensively, little has been written on the explicit links between tolling technology configurations and policy objectives. This paper addresses this gap in the literature through an examination of eight road pricing programs. For each program we evaluate the conduct of the three technical tasks via the nine technology sets in light of six principal policy objectives of road pricing.We find that two policy factors most often determine the type of roadway tolling technologies adopted: (1) the geographical scale of the road network tolled, and (2) the complexity of calculating the fee to be charged. The combination of these two factors can vary greatly – from flat fare tolling on individual facilities, to nationwide road networks priced with dynamic tolls that vary by vehicle class, time of day, and congestion level. We conclude that the challenge to the expanded implementation of road pricing is less about either pricing technologies or the objectives of pricing, but the politically and economically effective linking of the two.

Evaluating the effects of urban congestion pricing: geographical accessibility versus social surplus

In urbanised areas around the world, road pricing policies are considered more and more frequently, the aim often being to alleviate (some of the) external traffic-related costs. To assess the effects of a proposed road pricing measure, several evaluation measures can be used, coming from different disciplines, including economics, transportation science and transport geography. In this paper, we compare two types of evaluation measure that can be used to assess the effectiveness of road pricing measures: geographical accessibility measures and economic social surplus measures. We explore the possibilities of both types of measure in terms of evaluating road pricing effects from a theoretical perspective, as well as comparing their outcome measures for a research area in the Netherlands. By means of correlation analysis and spatial comparison of outcomes, we find that geographical accessibility measures, being simpler and easier to interpret than economic measures, offer a poor proxy of the outcomes of the economic evaluation measures and vice versa. Therefore, the decision whether to use economic surplus measures or geographical accessibility indicators to a large extent depends on the research goal. If the goal is to gain a thorough insight into the monetary gains/losses resulting from a policy measure, economic measures, such as the rule-of-half or the logsum measure, are preferable. However, if there are concrete questions about the changes in accessibility of certain types of activity locations, geographical indicators, such as the contour and potential measures, are more appropriate. The outcomes of such geographical measures, and especially those of the contour measures, are, however, sensitive to the spatial distribution of activity locations in the area under study and to the selection of the impedance parameter that has to be selected in advance to compute the effects. Therefore, if geographical indicators are to be used, it would be wise to use different sensitivity parameters. It is only then that a thorough insight can be gained into the (sensitivity of) geographical accessibility effects.

Modeling politicians' preferences for road pricing policies: A regret-based and utilitarian perspective

This paper presents the results of a stated choice-study among Dutch local politicians in the context of road pricing policies. Politicians were asked to express their preferences for policy-options that differed in terms of (i) emissions reduction, (ii) congestion reduction, (iii) operational costs, (iv) acceptability among the general public and (v) acceptability among retailers. Utility-maximization-based and regret-minimization-based discrete choice models were estimated, and their results compared, on 238 stated choices made by members of Dutch city-councils. The estimated models allow for the evaluation of the popularity of different road pricing scenarios among Dutch local politicians, as a function of their performance in terms of the above-mentioned criteria.

Spatial impacts of road pricing: Accessibility, regional spillovers and territorial cohesion

Road pricing policies are gaining prominence in EU countries. These policies have positive impacts leading to mobility patterns which are socially and environmentally more desirable, but they also have negative impacts. One negative impact is to be found in regional accessibility, due to the increase in generalized transport costs. This study presents a methodology based on accessibility indicators and GIS to assess the accessibility impacts of a road pricing policy. The methodology was tested for the Spain’s road network considering two road pricing scenarios. It enables not only the more penalized regions to be identified but also negative road pricing spillover effects between regions. These effects are measured in terms of accessibility changes occurring in one region produced by charges implemented in another region. Finally, the study of accessibility disparities (by calculating inequality indexes for each of the scenarios considered), provides policymakers with useful information regarding the impact of road pricing policies from the point of view of territorial cohesion.

Using Social Research to Measure, Understand and Predict Behavioral Responses to Road Pricing in the UK

ABSTRACT The Department for Transport (UK) has developed a program of social research to inform road pricing policy making, using both traditional and innovative research methods. The program addresses issues of public acceptability, the distributional impacts of road pricing policies, and behavioral responses to a complex pricing system. This paper discusses the methodological approaches used therein and sets out some emerging findings. The purpose is to review the use of this social research program and assess its potential for informing transport policy-making, an area where it has traditionally been under-utilized.