How to design publicly acceptable road pricing? Experimental insights from Switzerland

Florian Lichtin, E. Keith Smith, Kay W. Axhausen and Thomas Bernauer

Ecological Economics, 2024, vol. 218, issue C

Abstract: Road based motorised transport has many important societal benefits but also results in various negative environmental externalities such as CO2 emissions or noise and local air pollution. Road pricing is widely regarded as an efficient and effective policy instrument for mitigating these externalities. In reality, however, it is politically controversial because it is associated with high opportunity costs and concerns over distributional effects. We examine whether and how designing road pricing in particular ways could help in achieving public support by implementing a conjoint experimental design using original data from a large, population-representative survey in Switzerland. Additionally, we test whether providing information about environmental benefits of road pricing increase support. We find that support for road pricing tapers off quite strongly when policy designs approach cost levels required for substantive mitigation of externalities and that preferences are robust against experimental manipulation. On the other hand, redistributing revenues towards public transport and green infrastructure increases support substantively at lower cost levels. The findings suggest that there are limits to how policy design and environmental communication can help overcome political feasibility barriers for road pricing. One should therefore focus on additional aspects to increase support such as policy sequencing.

Keywords: Road pricing; Congestion charging; Transport policy; Policy support; Survey experiment; Policy design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923003658
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:218:y:2024:i:c:s0921800923003658

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.108102

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().