17: Political Acceptance of Road Pricing: Goal Conflicts in Municipality Decision Making

Political awareness is increasing about the need for reducing car use to abate negative impacts on the environment. Different types of road-pricing schemes are proposed means to accomplish this. At the same time, road pricing creates revenues for the municipality. In Sweden it has been argued that the local municipalities should be authorized to decide how much car users would be charged.

Road pricing refers to different schemes such as, for instance, toll rings (Odeck and Bråthen, 1997; Fournier and Monsigny, 1998) or zone-based systems (Hug, Mock-Hecker and Würtenberger, 1997). Either all car users are charged a flat fee or charges are differentiated based on, for instance, time of day, period of use, or distance travelled (Johansson and Mattsson, 1995). The overall purpose of road-pricing emphasized in economic theory is to increase allocation efficiency by internalising externalities, so that road-users' private costs of a trip coincide with the social costs. Nevertheless, practical experiences from road-pricing reveal that policy makers often have a very different perspective. In addition to these perspectives, Lindberg (1995) identifies three purposes with road pricing to be (1) to reduce air pollution, (2) to reduce congestion, and (3) to finance infrastructure.