Institutional perspectives on road pricing : essays on implementation, response, and adaptation

Road pricing involves charging road users a fee for the external social costs of using private vehicles. These costs typically remain unaccounted for in routine road transport operations and benefit-cost analyses. They include the costs of travel delays for other road users due to congestion, the costs of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and the health costs resulting from exposure to pollutants and road accidents. In spite of strong theoretical foundations dating back to the 1920s, road pricing remains politically difficult to implement for several reasons. These include concerns about equity impacts and the lack of alternatives to the use of private vehicles, lack of public acceptance for the idea of paying a charge for personal mobility, the administrative complexity of implementation, and the uncertain long term economic impacts of the policy. My dissertation focuses on the institutional challenges to implementation of road pricing that have not received adequate attention in literature, through three papers on the following topics. 1) Vehicle Restrictions in Four Latin American Cities: Is Congestion Pricing Possible? 2) Potential Impacts of Road Pricing on Businesses and Freight Transport: The Case of the Netherlands 3) Implications of the London Congestion Charge for Firms in Key Economic Sectors: Influencing Factors, Impacts, and Responses In Paper 1, I examine the problems related to adopting road pricing in cities of the developing world that are motorizing rapidly. There are very few studies of this policy in the context of the social, economic, and institutional constraints unique to urban areas in developing countries. The cases studied include four Latin American cities where the command-and-control policy of vehicle circulation bans is already in effect for over a decade, in response to environmental and transportation problems. These restrictions have not been able to prevent the growth in car ownership and traffic congestion, creating the need to consider alternative market-based approaches such as road pricing along with complementary investments in urban public transportation.