Acceptability of Marginal Cost-based Pricing in Urban Transport

For a variety of reasons, economists strongly recommend the implementation of differentiated pricing strategies in transport as well as in other domains of every day life. Technological research has already solved many of the practical requirements for the introduction of flexible urban transport pricing schemes. However, apart from technological and legal problems, the lack of public acceptability is recognized as one of the main obstacles to the implementation of road pricing measures. Likewise, the acceptability of systems is assumed to be a major factor influencing effectiveness of the implementation of a system (Van der Laan 1998). Numerous studies indicate the rejection of pricing measures by a majority of car drivers (e.g. Bartley 1995; Jones 1991a, 1991b; Luk and Chung 1997). For instance, results of the TransPrice-study 1 show that — with only little variation between cities — car drivers most accept public transport improvements, followed by the provision of more park and ride facilities and, surprisingly, then by access restrictions for inner cities (Schlag and Schade 2000). Reducing parking space has much lower acceptability, but least accepted generally are fees concerning both the stationary traffic (parking fees) and, most strongly refused, driving on urban roads (distance-based pricing), even if it is only imposed at times with high traffic density (congestion pricing/peak-load pricing).