Inflexible price strategy

Current pricing strategies are somewhat inflexible with time-variant traffic demand. In London, the motorists only need to pay once (daily £10) a day, no matter how many times they drive in and out of the charging zone on the same day. The Stockholm congestion tax depends on what time of the day a motorist enters or exits the congestion tax area with a maximum limit per vehicle per day. And even the time-varied pricing of Singapore with rates varying every 5mins to 20mins, is far away from saying flexible with the fluctuation of travel demand which is virtually affected by much more constraints than only a time variant, including characteristics of the motorists (commuter or visitor), activity aims (business or work), weather (raining, fog, snowing and etc), and other incidents (exhibition or sports event), etc.

Button (1993) and Small, et al. (2007) admitted that setting the right price for the congestion charge in practice becomes a trial and error experience. Roth (1998) even argued that no matter how precisely the pricing designed by the authorities, the notion of ''peak-period surcharges'' is inconsistent with people's common sense of 'off-peak discounts' which is usual in commercial sectors by who the price would be settled to ensure an appropriate attraction to customers and to maintain a certain level of service. The divergence at ideology, that to block traffic demand or to attract traffic demand, makes consequent differences on the motivation and practice of maintaining and improving roadway service. Take an interesting question for instance, is there anyone who would expect compensations in current CP scheme when a drop of provided service occurred caused by improper signal timing?

 

Pitfalls with enforcement

Despite the severe congestion and environmental problems caused by automobile usage in many urban centres, only few implementations of CP to reduce external spillovers have taken place all over the world (e.g. Singapore, London, Stockholm and Durham), and some cities have, even recently, rejected the proposal (e.g. Edinburgh) (Frisoni, 2007). 

 

In front of the CP proposal, the mostly mentioned concern from public is that it could be enforced to become just another tax. As several authors have pointed out, the kind of tax is "probably the least popular instrument available" (Verhoef et al. 1997) and, indeed, the less feasible to implement in the transport case (Santos and Newbery 2001). Roth G. (1998) concerned that the additional revenues generated from CP program would be at the disposal of government to be spent in accordance with its political priorities, and worried that such an arrangement might give governments, both central and local, a vested interest in maintaining high levels of congestion, to increase their revenues. It seems to be very hard (or impossible) to explain to the public with the marginal social cost theory of CP. 

The unique context of the Chinese cities

Chinese cities have more special difficulties for adopting the congestion pricing, such as the powerful government relative to civil society, the considerable amount of municiple vehicles, and rapid urban growth and structural change.

 

(The end)

转载本文请联系原作者获取授权，同时请注明本文来自范文博科学网博客。
链接地址：https://m.sciencenet.cn/blog-92473-469431.html

上一篇：1.1.2 交通服务是物品也是成本
下一篇：第二节 交通需求的分析方法