Road pricing

Executive summary There are two main concepts in the literature for pricing for road usage: road pricing and congestion pricing. Road pricing is the more general term. In the current situation road users don’t pay for the external costs they generate by making use of the car. Road pricing is a concept which internalizes those external costs into the price for road usage, which ideally will lead to less congestion on the roads. Examples of road pricing can be found in London and Singapore. Projects in Stockholm showed that peoples attitude towards road pricing increased during the project since congestion and parking problems decreased. The first option on road pricing in the Netherlands came in 1999 with the project Rekeningrijden. This plan was cancelled but in 2005 Road Pricing again came on the agenda of the government. Tests were done in different projects with the name Spitsmijden, which showed that car drivers can be influenced when they receive a certain amount of money when avoiding peak time travelling. In the empirical research we also found some interesting results. Gender has a significant influence on the concept of environment and rush hour. In both cases women are more in favour to an environmental tax and a rush hour tax. Also, higher educated students (WO&HBO) disagree significantly more to the fact that a rush hour tax will result in a reduction of congestion and that such a tax is unjust for the people who can’t avoid rush hours. Finally, we found out that there are no significant relations between different faculties on the five concepts of the Kilometerheffing. On the other hand, the students differ in opinion how congestion could be better reduced in a different way than the Kilometerheffing. The alternative that excise taxes on fuel should be raised is significantly in favour of ESE and ESL students. The second alternative where there is a significant relation is the alternative where the current road network needs to be expanded. Here the students of the ESE and the RSM disagree to this alternative, where the other faculties are more in favour for such a measure.