Implementing Road Pricing Standards, Institutions, Costs, and Public Acceptance

Sammanfattning: Much has been researched and written about road pricing, and especially how it affects traffic flow, congestion, the environment, and social welfare in general. This doctoral thesis analyses the implementation of road user charges rather than its effects. The dissertation consists of five separate papers, each addressing a subset of the topic. The first paper sheds light on the costs to introduce congestion taxes in Stockholm, and describes how public opinion and political risk lead to a system design that in all likelihood was more expensive than necessary. In the second paper the European regulation on interoperability between road charging system is evaluated from a benefit/cost perspective, which is found to be overly ambitious. Paper three builds upon the second, and suggests a general model for how costs and benefits interact in the case of road charging interoperability. Inpaper four a potential solution is presented for how the practical problems related to enforcement of road charging in an international context or in countries with weak institutions. The fifth and final paper analyses the public opinion of road charges, and especially urban congestion charges, using a survey conducted simultaneously in three European cities.