European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2005) 31/XI

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.

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.

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.

The primary objective of infrastructure pricing in normative economics and policy discussions is economic efficiency This focus has led to the proposal that charges for infrastructure use should be based on all internal and external marginal costs associated with the use of infrastructure services. Distributional considerations, of the “fairness” of infrastructure pricing often played a supplementary role to help the acceptance of infrastructure charging. This paper sets out a simple framework for a quasi-market for infrastructure services with the perspective of simultaneously determining efficient prices and levels of infrastructure investment. It is shown that, depending on the intensity of infrastructure use, revenues generated by efficient prices do not in all cases cover the full costs of the services. Efficient cost recovery requires an additional fixed charge. Such a combination of a fixed charge and an efficient price per unit of service implies a distributional conflict if users differ substantially in their demand for infrastructure services. It is shown that methods to allocate fixed costs resolve this conflict applying standard norms of distributional justice and being compatible with a bargaining equilibrium among heterogeneous infrastructure users.

The United States and Canada lag Europe and Singapore in implementing road pricing on a large scale. But the two countries have shown interest in tolling roads as a way to curb congestion and to generate revenues. The US is funding congestion pricing demonstration projects through its Value Pricing Pilot Program, and Canada has examined new ways to charge for road use and to finance road construction and maintenance. This paper reviews the current state of road pricing and funding in the two countries. The prospects for extensive road pricing appear to be brighter in the US than in Canada.

We construct a political economy model to analyze the political acceptability of road pricing policies. We use a citizen-candidate framework with a population composed by three groups differing for their income level. We show that road pricing policies are never applied when there is no redistribution of the resources in favour of other modes of transport or when the congestion of these types of transport is relatively high. The results suggest that the efficiency of the redistribution of resources from road to the alternative types of transport as well as the fraction of the population that uses the road transport are key factors in explaining the adoption of road pricing schemes.

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.

Though congestion tolls can increase social welfare, the public often opposes them. One explanation for the opposition is that a road user views a congestion toll as punishment for the damage he causes others. Since a user suffers from congestion, he believes that he has already suffered some punishment and therefore it is unfair or unjust to impose a toll in addition. We assume that a person views a congestion toll as unjust if the toll exceeds the difference between the congestion externality a road user generates on others and the uncompensated externality he suffers from others. We explore the implications of such a view. We illustrate how to determine the toll that satisfies this criterion of justice and how the socially optimal toll violates the criterion. We examine how the just toll varies with the parameters of the model. We discuss the implications of alternative definitions of justice and possible extensions of the basic model considered.