ABSTRACT
This paper reviews a variety of examples of road pricing covering a wide range of sites, objectives, and implementation strategies. Objectives range from raising revenues to reducing traffic externalities. Locations include single facilities, city centers, and entire metropolitan regions. Five of the projects are in place, two are in the process of implementation, and four were seriously considered proposals. We focus on the political, institutional, and operational features that shed light on how urban governments are able to approach congestion pricing.
We find evidence that significant pricing incentives can produce major changes in behavior, and that even small incentives can produce targeted changes, such as small shifts in the time of day of travel. Furthermore, experience shows that road pricing can operate smoothly given thorough planning, attention to detail, and a willingness to learn from prior experience.
Projects that are politically acceptable show several characteristic traits. They tend to be fairly simple in design, to build incrementally on previously existing arrangements or experience, to address clearly understood and widely supported objectives, and to involve transparent financial flows that facilitate public trust in the use of the monies. Too simple a design may reduce the possible congestion savings and other benefits, but great complexity does not add much to the benefits and can 290increase political opposition. The incremental accumulation of experience and public trust in Scandinavia has facilitated the progressively more sophisticated applications of toll rings around city centers in Norway and Sweden. This same experience may have facilitated the serious consideration given to more ambitious proposals in the London and Randstad regions. In France and southern California, time-varying tolls were seen as a way to solve particular problems of a toll road operator; in each case the rationale was transparent and acceptable to the public given the particular context.
