The social feasibility of road pricing: a case study for the Randstad area

Road pricing1 is a highly controversial topic, and debates about its desirability tend to be heated. Economists often seem surprised by the difficulties they face in communicating this 'obviously good idea', and apparently have done an unsuccessful job so far in convincing politicians and the public at large of the beneficial properties of road charging (Arnott et a/., 1994). Moreover, even academics themselves appear to have strong and passionate but diverging opinions on the issues of road congestion and congestion charging, as shown by the relatively large number of comments and replies that papers on these topics seem to trigger (Foster, 1974, 1975 versus Richardson, 1974, 1975; Else, 1981, 1982 versus Nash, 1982; Evans, 1992, 1993 versus Hills, 1993; and Lave, 1994, 1995 versus Verhoef, 1995). The apparently limited social and political feasibility of road pricing has led various authors to study this problem from different perspectives. However, empirical research into this important issue is scarce. Nevertheless, it is evident that, no matter how important theoretical reasoning may be for understanding the pros and cons of road pricing, its feasibility will in the end be an empirical matter. This paper discusses the outcomes of a survey among morning peakroad users in the Dutch Randstad area, the main aim of which was to provide an exploratory analysis of road users' opinions on road pricing. The paper starts with a brief review of the problem of road pricing's limited social feasibility. The study design and some general results are presented in Section 3. The exploratory analysis of the opinions on road pricing in Section 4 is ordered according to the structure of the recursive model that was designed for this purpose. Section 5 considers the allocation of revenues, and its impact on the feasibility of road pricing. Finally, Section 6 presents conclusions.