Modelling some equality and social welfare impacts of road tolling under conditions of traffic uncertainty

Alejandro Ortega, José Manuel Vassallo and Juan Ignacio Pérez

Research in Transportation Economics, 2021, vol. 88, issue C

Abstract: This paper studies the combination of tolls that maximises equality in an interurban network with a toll highway and a free parallel single road which could be tolled as well. Equality is defined by a novel indicator which reflexes earlier equality definitions; it measures the proportion of travellers’ willingness to pay not consumed by the monetary transport costs with respect to their willingness to pay. Users are heterogeneous as their values of travel time (VTT) are different. The research also analyses how the VTT distribution affects this optimal combination. The authors conduct several numerical analyses and compare results under two cases: welfare maximization and equality maximization. For the type of network and users selected the results show that the higher the average VTT, the higher the optimal price, and the higher the dispersion (variance) of VTT, the lower the optimal price. Moreover, to optimize equality, the road should remain free. The most equitable scenario worsen high-income users whereas middle-income users benefit from it. More users are better off under the welfare scenario, which also leads to a higher overall surplus. Finally, welfare pricing and equality pricing schemes work oppositely but match for high traffic levels.

Keywords: Optimal price; Fully charged corridor; Equality; Social welfare; Income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D4 D5 D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0739885921000822
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:retrec:v:88:y:2021:i:c:s0739885921000822

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_2&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2021.101110

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Transportation Economics is currently edited by M. Dresner

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