Road Pricing: The Public Viewpoint

Abstract

While many academics and practitioners in the transport field now consider the case for introducing road user charging to be a very strong one, as a mechanism for making drivers pay the various externalities associated with their vehicle use, there are many cities around the world where schemes which sought to apply such principles to car traffic were not implemented due to adverse public reaction and political pressures — even though they had considerable technical merit. Instances include proposals for supplementary licensing in London and Kuala Lumpur, and for electronic road pricing in Hong Kong (Borins, 1988) and the Netherlands (Stoelhorst and Zandbergen, 1990), as well as the various attempts to increase petrol taxes in the United States.