Acceptability of Road Pricing

Abstract

joined Racal (now Thales) as Technical Manager in 1980. He managed collaborative projects in Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Intelligent Transport Systems, Traffic Information Broadcasting, and road pricing, funded by the UK Department of Trade & Industry, the Technology Strategy Board, the UK Department for Transport and the European Commission. He led the security work-package of the DfT-funded DIRECTS Road Pricing demonstration project. His role as Chief Technical Consultant before he retired from Thales in February 2010 included business development and project management in road pricing and ITS. John was an Expert Advisor to Transport for London in their Congestion Charging technology trials. He is a member of the Executive Team of the Institution of Engineering and Technology's Automotive and Road Transport Technical and Professional Network, and of its Berkshire Network; he has organised and chaired five international seminars on Road Pricing and two on Managed Motorways for the IET. He is the editor of two books: "Mobile Information Systems" (1990) and "Advances in Mobile Information Systems" (1998), and of two Artech House book Series, "ITS" and "Mobile Communications". John is currently an independent consultant working part-time for Thales and other clients. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Transportation Research Group at Southampton University, and Honorary Secretary of the Road User Charging Interest Group of ITS(UK). His professional interests have included solid state physics, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and mobile communications, but are now centred on Intelligent Transport Systems, especially road pricing (including technology, deployment, and public acceptability).

Understanding public response to a congestion charge: A random-effects ordered logit approach

“…This result was tested in Kim et al (2013) using the New Jersey sample. Kim et al (2013) reported that government trust has strong influence on perceived fairness and thus is critical for obtaining acceptability Problem awareness Congestion charge will be more acceptable if the public is aware of the problems that can be mitigated by implementing such a scheme, such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and climate change (Schade and Schlag, 2000;Steg, 2003;Gärling et al, 2008). Problem awareness can be further broken down as social problem awareness, self problem awareness, and personal problem awareness.…”

Carrots versus sticks: Rewarding commuters for avoiding the rush-hour—a study of willingness to participate

“…Thus, an optimum needs to be found with respect to participation rate and behavioral response. This is important since research in the road pricing arena (Gärling et al, 2008;Schuitema et al, 2008) suggests that perceived effectiveness is a critical factor for public acceptance of policies.…”

How Smog Awareness Influences Public Acceptance of Congestion Charge Policies

“…To reduce confusion, we used the term 'acceptance' with the clarification that this is not implementation acceptance but preference toward a proposal. Existing literature, although mainly based on data from Europe or the U.S., investigated key determinants of public acceptance of congestion charge policies [15][16][17][18][19]. Various factors have been tested through two perspectives, namely the individual behavioral perspective and the policy-related perspective [15][16][17][18][19][27][28][29].…”

“…Rooted in individual value judgment and behavioral studies, behavioral perspective argues that public acceptance of congestion fees is influenced by factors such as social norms, infringement on freedom, and socio demographic aspects [15,[17][18][19]. Congestion charges contain a social dilemma wherein individuals' self-interests-such as driving comfortably-conflict with the collective interest, in this case, of abating the congestion problem [30].…”