Income and access inequalities of a cordon pricing

Making a city more sustainable without increasing inequalities induces the evaluation of new pricing policies on inequalities. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of setting up urban tolls on several inequalities indicators. We simulate a cordon pricing with different levels of prices and evaluate its impacts on inequalities using both income and accessibility indices. We adopt a comparison-based approach to reduce the bias resulting from the spatial division. In agreement with the literature, we show that introducing a toll increases inequalities. The greatest increases in inequality are located in both the most central zones (within the boundary), the inner or the outer ring where the timesavings do not offset the increase in travel cost. For spatial inequalities, although we observe an improvement of accessibility, particularly for central zones, the first ring (adjacent to the toll zone) is the most adversely affected by the toll.