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Road pricing is term that refers to the charging for the use of streets and roads. This is usually done by charging motorists directly for its use.
European application Various trials have taken place in British cities - the City of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, for example, had experimented with congestion charging as far back as 1993.* For some years all italian highways can be used on the base of a toll payment, also by electronic TELEPASS system. Facing rising levels of congestion, European governments are giving serious consideration to nationwide road pricing schemes which would exploit the new Galileo satellite positioning system. Every vehicle would have to contain a satellite tracking device which would determine which roads were being driven along, for how far and at what time of day. This information would then be sent to a central computer system. Schemes for charging trucks (lorries) in Germany by the company Toll Collect, and Austria are already underway. Under the German scheme, which went live on 1st January 2005, lorries pay between €0.09 and €0.14 per kilometre depending on their emission levels and number of axles. The expensive scheme, combining satellite technology with other technologies, suffered numerous delays before implementation, whilst a scheme using much simpler technology in Austria was up and running in 2004. In the UK, the Labour government announced in July 2005 that the proposed UK lorry road user charging scheme would not go ahead. Extensive studies are being done on introducing a scheme for all UK vehicles, with an aim to implementation at the earliest around 2013. In October 2005 the UK government suggested they explore "piggy-backing" road pricing on private sector technologies, such as pay-as-you-go insurance (also known as Pay As You Drive PAYD), thus avoiding a large-scale public sector procurement exercise. If introduced, this scheme would likely see a charge being levied per kilometre depending on the time of day, the road being driven along, and perhaps the type of vehicle. For example, a large car driving along the western section of the M25 in rush hour would pay a high charge; a small car driving along a rural lane would pay a much lower charge. The very highest charges would be likely in the most congested urban areas. It is expected that rural motorists would benefit the most from such a scheme, perhaps by paying less through road pricing than they do at present through petrol and car taxes, whereas urban motorists would pay much more than they presently do. However, this is highly dependent on whether such a scheme would be designed to be either revenue neutral or congestion neutral. A revenue neutral scheme would replace (at least in part) petrol and vehicle taxes, and would be such that Treasury revenue under the new scheme would equal the revenue from current taxes. A congestion neutral scheme would be designed so that growth in congestion levels would stop as a result of the new charges; the latter scheme would require significantly higher (and increasingly higher) charges than the revenue neutral scheme and so would be unpopular with the UK's 30 million motorists. The carbon emission consequence of moving from fuel duty to a charge per mile has been raised as a concern by some environmentalists, as has any diversionary response from heavily trafficked (and hence more expensive) roads. The UK government announced funding for road pricing research in 7 local areas in November 2005. It should also be noted that the current government did not originally float the idea of road user pricing for all UK vehicles; the Conservative government was also studying the idea in the 1980s, though principally considering tolling to pay for the construction of motorways rather than to control congestion. Even back in the early 1960s, the Smeed Report considered how to implement congestion charging. Any governing party will generally find that congestion is unavoidable without some form of price restraint being applied in the future. See also | ||||||||
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