Voting on Road Congestion Policy

Russo, Antonio

Voting on Road Congestion Policy

No 12-310, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: We study the political economy of urban traffic policy. We consider a city and its suburbs. The city decides, by majority voting, on a parking charge in the Central Business District (CBD) and restrictions on road space dedicated to cars. City and suburbs vote on road pricing in the CBD. Results include the following. When the majority of city voters prefers cars to public transport sufficiently more than the average voter, car charges and space restrictions are smaller than optimal. If the suburbs' voters have stronger preferences for cars than the city's, road pricing has the lowest political support among the instruments we consider. Tax exporting and imperfect government coordination may inflate total charges. This is welfare enhancing if it compensates for voters' opposition to car restraining policies. Earmarking charge revenues for public transport is welfare enhancing only if they are topped up by extra funds from a national government.

Keywords: Road pricing; parking charges; majority voting; multiple government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05, Revised 2012-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/pe/wp_tse_310_v2.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting on road congestion policy (2013)
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:tse:wpaper:25844

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().