European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2005) 31/XI

Venice is worldwide known as one of the most intriguing places, hosting an average of 15 million tourists per year. This paper describes the causes of the economical inefficiency of the freight transportation system in Venice, and analyses the problems caused by the damages done by the waves. A properly modified form of road pricing, aiming at improving the efficiency of the traffic chains by introducing the pressure of competition between the freight operators, is thereby conceived and the possible deriving scenarios are described.

After many delays, technological problems, and renegotiations between the government and the system operator Germany has successfully introduced a satellite based tolling system for heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) in January 2005. Since then the system is running smoothly. Currently the toll applies only to state motorways (the so called Autobahnen) but there are plans to extend it to the secondary level of federal long-distance roads (the Bundesfernstraßen). This paper describes the political and economic background of the introduction of the HGV-toll in Germany. The paper sketches the history of the implementation process, describes the major structural elements of the toll, and discusses current problems and possible future developments. Finally some policy conclusions are drawn.

This paper presents the results from a questionnaire among Dutch car owners. We have analysed the behavioural responses to three different, policy relevant, road pricing measures. Depending on the type of measure and type of trip affected, we find reductions in the number of car trips of, on average, 11%. A flat kilometre charge affects social trips considerably more than commuting trips. However, when policy makers want to affect peak time (commuting) traffic, a time differentiated measure is more appropriate. Slow traffic and trip suppression are most popular alternatives for non-commuting trips. Departure time changes become very attractive for all purposes when the proposed measure varies over time.

A proposal has been made to build a new tunnel under the Scheldt river near the centre of Antwerp in order to relieve traffic congestion on the ring road and in an existing tunnel. The new tunnel is expected to cost more than €1 billion, and tolls have been suggested to help finance construction and to manage demand. This paper conducts a preliminary cost-benefit analysis of a new tunnel and three alternative tolling schemes, and compares them with a do-nothing scenario and an option to toll the existing tunnel without building a new one. The two tunnels are treated as imperfect substitutes, and a multi-year accounting framework is adopted that accounts for emissions, accidents and noise externalities, road damage, revenues accruing to the national and regional governments from existing transport user charges, and the salvage value of the new tunnel. With the base-case parameter values it is found that building the tunnel is worthwhile with all three tolling regimes and yields a higher benefit than not building the tunnel and tolling the old one. Nevertheless, the net benefit from building the tunnel differs appreciably between tolling regimes, and it is sensitive to the value assumed for the marginal cost of public funds.

There is a growing interest in the development and the use of large-scale planning models. In this paper, we describe the first step of a project to integrate UrbanSim, a dynamic microsimulation land use model, and METROPOLIS, a dynamic traffic model. This is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to integrate a dynamic land use model and a dynamic traffic model. We briefly describe the two models and propose a unified framework for their integration. Within this integrated framework we develop a model of residential location choice, with endogenous housing prices and traffic. The study area for this research is the Ile-de-France (Paris region), for which we provide empirical results.