City tolls and cheap public transport fares: substitutes or complements?

Purpose and goal

City tolls are widely recognised as an effective policy measure to fight congestion and decrease the negative environmental impacts of car traffic in cities. However, they suffer from low public acceptability, with one reason being expected adverse distributional impacts. Such public resistance makes the idea of city tolls de facto non-operational, with noticeable exception s being Singapore, London, Stockholm and Gothenburg. This motivates our search for road tolling schemes that can really work in citie, while also being perceived as fair

Expected effects and result

Based on unique Swedish data, we measure to what extent this concern is justified. Moreover, we propose and investigate innovative road-pricing schemes with cash-back components that might have both substantial public support and a positive welfare effect.

Planned approach and implementation

To measure the distributional impacts of tolls, we make use of detailed data from existing Swedish congestion charging schemes. We will use a unique register database covering the full Swedish adult population in 2018, containing 5 million households. The database contains socio-economic information, as well as information about the paid congestion tax in a year, and paid congestion tax for all professional vehicles, which is of high interest.