European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2008) 40/XIV

This paper focuses on urban road pricing as a demand management policy that is often regarded as radical and generally unacceptable. Road pricing often gets delayed or abandoned due to low acceptability. This may be due to the fact that complex interactions and drivers of change affect road transport management and require cooperation within implementation networks. The implementation network is a group of people (referred to as partners and actors) who co-ordinate the introduction of policy tools. The drivers of change include any internal or external influences that have an effect on the time, place, or ‘shape’ of the policy measures being introduced. Demand management measures that focus on 'sustainable transport' usually address a limited set of objectives and are often implemented alone i.e. are not necessarily combined with other policy measures. When combined with other measures, it is not always clear whether the multiple interactions between policy tools and implementation networks have been sufficiently considered. Examples of ongoing implementation of policy package in the UK are the support of road pricing initiatives combined with public transport improvements by the Transport Innovation Fund. The objectives of the paper are twofold. First, we present a review of the UK urban road pricing situation. Second, we contrast the emerging issues against six key implementation factors. The analysis of three existing UK road pricing examples - London, Edinburgh and Durham – shows the importance of combining policy tools. Furthermore, through the above examples and theoretical arguments, we emphasise the additional need of creating and maintaining strong networks when implementing policy packages.

We set out to investigate whether transportation improvements can trigger welfare economic impacts in a peripheral region. The paper addresses this issue through the development of a general equilibrium labor market model with a transportation component. The model is implemented to a set of 101 core and peripheral cities in Israel. Numeric simulations are carried out to test the research hypotheses regarding positive relationship between improved accessibility and enhanced economic welfare. Economic welfare is measured in terms of efficiency and equity impacts. The results of the simulations show that transportation improvements in the form of auto travel time reductions may lead to substantial welfare benefits in the peripheral region considered in terms of increased output, productivity and wages.

It is commonly accepted that there is a two-way relationship between land use and transport in urban areas. Land use affects transport, conditioning travel demand. Conversely, transport affects land use, conditioning spatial distribution of activities and land market. The problem of simulating mutual interactions between land use and transport has been tackled by socalled Land Use Transport Interaction (LUTI) models. Different modelling approaches are present in literature, which are generally grouped into three main categories: spatial micro-economic, spatial interaction and spatial accounting models. The paper presents a spatial accounting LUTI model, which relies on Multi-Regional-Input-Output (MRIO) framework. The model has two main interacting components: an activity model and a transport model, which allow to endogenously estimate activities generation and location, land prices, travel demand and transport accessibility. The proposed LUTI model has been specified and applied in an urban area, more particularly to the town of Reggio Calabria (Italy). The objective of the application is the estimation of long-term impacts on land use and passenger travel demand patterns when interventions on transport facilities and services are planned at a strategic scale. The results confirm that MRIO framework offers the potentialities to bring activity location, land use in line within travel demand modelling.

This paper estimates the real estate benefits due to accessibility gains brought by a light rail infrastructure (the T2 tramway, in the Hauts-de-Seine). According to Urban Economics, the accessibility improvements resulting from a transport project will influence the residential location choices of households, and eventually the land rents at equilibrium will include the valuation of accessibility gains made by these households. Apart from accessibility, housing choice also depends on other characteristics: internal characteristics and external (environmental) characteristics. To take into account all these determinants, we have estimated a hedonic price function of residential properties econometrically. The data used are sales of residential dwellings in the Hauts-de-Seine department, population census and other sources, from 1993 to 2004, to take into account anticipation and learning effects. The hedonic price function obtained allows us to measure implicit or “hedonic” prices of dwellings with a given group of characteristics, and isolates the pure effect of each characteristic on the price of a dwelling. The results show that the T2 tramway accessibility improvements are capitalized into the housing prices. To measure this capitalization into real estate, we calculate the prices of dwellings with and without these accessibility gains. For the whole department, we estimate a capitalization around 3%.