Tolling of road projects are initiated on the basis that users will receive benefits earlier than is possible with scarce government funds. The purpose of the toll projects and toll rings are to finance main road projects, and to allow them to be built much sooner than if financed through governmental funds. It is a common practice that planners and researchers conduct feasibility studies on the viability of such projects. The results are then presented to the decision makers who take them for granted and therefore sanction tolling on that basis. In the process, roads users are often ignored, at least as far as their attitudes are concerned. Understanding of road users’ attitudes towards tolls is important to have a successful implementation of road pricing schemes. One major issue related to road pricing that has raised considerable interest in the recent years, is that road pricing has been discussed for decades but has rarely gone past the initial studies. (Exceptions from this are the Area Licensing scheme in Singapore and most recently, the London road pricing scheme). The same may be said about many unsuccessful toll cordon schemes around the world. The reasons seem to be the absence of sufficient political support. Clearly, the lack of political support reflect the attitudes of the voters; road users. Previous studies on users’ attitudes towards road user charges have mostly been concentrated on examining attitudes prior to implementation. Very few studies have examined attitudes after implementation and almost none have examined attitudes both ex-ante and ex-post using data from the same scheme. The aim of this paper is to study users’ attitudes towards road user charges both before and after tolls have been implemented, and using observations on attitudes that stretches across a 14 years period. The Oslo toll ring, which was opened in 1990, is the case example. A survey on users attitudes has been conducted annually here ever since 1989, the year before the toll was implemented. We use this rich data set from 1989 to 2003 to explore users’ attitudes in general, whether attitudes change over time and factors that are critical in determining users’ attitudes. In addition, some strategies for improving support for road tolling are suggested. (Author/publisher)
Abstract