ABSTRACT
Traditionally the methods of charging for road use have taken one of two forms. There have long been tolled roads, of the type initiated in Britain in the seventeenth century, where users pay a fee for use. More widely, road users are charged even less directly for their use of infrastructure through a variety of taxes that may be hypothecated to be spent on the road network or flow into the general coffers of the Treasury to be spent as government wishes. Nobel Prize winning economist, Ronald Coase, so ably famously demonstrated, policies such as Road Pricing are not market solutions but the most effective way of achieving an externally determined target traffic flow. Keong for example, argues that the issue of privacy is inevitable when implementing electronic road pricing. There are numerous academic and official studies that have examined the potential effects of using road user charges of one form or another to reduce urban traffic congestion.
