The Stockholm congestion charging system went live Jan 3rd 2006, being the third The system consists of a cordon around the city center, with a time-varying charge being levied for each crossing in any direction. The system and its general effects on traffic etc. are described in another presentation. This presentation instead focuses on a description of the most methodologically interesting part of the evaluation: the cost-benefit analysis. What makes this interesting from a methodological point of view is thatthe calculation of the value of social costs and benefits (in terms of decreased travel times, incerased travel costs, changing travel patterns etc.) is based on observed, real-world data (rather than model-forecasted data). The most important data sources are: a very large, two-wave panel travel survey (around 2*40 000 complete surveys); traffic flow measurements onaround 200 links (around 50 of those are continuous measurements, going on 24h/day for several months); travel times measurements (24h/day for morethan a year) on around 60 links (in two directions); a small fleet pf private cars equipped with GPS logging travel times and travel behaviour and floating car data on a number of major roads. All these data sources are supplemented with existing forecasting tools to calculate the social value of changes in travel times, travel costs etc. One of the many methodological difficulties is the need to account for different values of time to explain why some car drivers go through the charged area and some don't. The presentation focuses on the methodology to calculate social cost-benefit analysis on such a large project using observed data rather than model-based data as far as possible. Results are also presented in some detail. These include e.g. values of travel time savings, changes in accidents, air quality, travel costs etc. Benefits and costs are also presented for different socioeconomic groups using sample enumeration techniques. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582.
Samenvatting