Lessons from the Stockholm congestion charging trial
Introduction
Among transport economists and traffic planners, congestion pricing has been advocated for a long time as an efficient means to reduce road congestion. Up until recent years, the idea had been applied almost nowhere, with Singapore the sole exception. In the last few years, however, congestion pricing has been introduced in various forms, with London and Stockholm being the most ambitious systems in the sense that the congestion charges cover large areas in the urban core.
The Stockholm case is interesting for many reasons. Obviously, the opportunity to gauge the effects of congestion charges on traffic, congestion levels and travel behaviour has attracted great interest. But perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the congestion charges survived a very complicated political and legal process, and a dedicated referendum that had initially been forced through by the opponents of the charges. In many ways, the most interesting from the perspective of other cities is the story of how and why the Stockholm charges went from “the most expensive way ever devised to commit political suicide1” to something termed by initially hostile media as a “success story” (Dagens Nyheter, June 22, 2006) with wide public and political support. The purpose of this article is to summarise the effects of the charges, and to discuss what can be learnt from the Stockholm experiences.
In Section 2, the story of the Stockholm charges is briefly recapitulated. Section 3 describes the logic behind the design of the charges and Section 4 summarises the effects of the charges. Section 5 discusses what lessons can be learnt for other cities from the Stockholm experiences.
Section snippets
A brief story of the Stockholm charges
The election in 2002 resulted in social-democratic governments backed by the Left and Green parties, both at the national level and in the City of Stockholm. But as a condition to support a social-democratic national government, the Green party demanded that there should be a “full-scale, several-year trial with congestion charges in Stockholm”. The leader of the Stockholm Social democrats, Annika Billström, had before the election promised that there would be no road pricing in Stockholm
The design of the system
The congestion charging system consists of a cordon around the inner city of Stockholm with time-differentiated charges. The area inside the cordon is around 30 km2 (Fig. 1)
The cost for crossing the cordon is SEK 10, 15 or 20 (1 € is a little less than 10 SEK) depending on the time of day (see Table 1), with a maximum amount per vehicle and day of SEK 60. The cost is the same in both directions. No congestion charge is levied during nights or holidays. Various exemptions (for e.g., buses,
Effects of the charges
The evaluation of the effects of the charges was mostly based on comparing 2005 measurements (before the charges) with 2006 measurements (with the charges).
A natural question is how much traffic might have been affected by other factors such as changes in fuel price, employment, population and car ownership.
Traffic volumes across the cordon used to increase at the same pace as the traffic in the county as a whole from the early 1970s (when regular measurements started) up until the early 1990s,
Reflections on the Stockholm trial
That the behaviour of car drivers is affected by costs is hardly surprising, even if there were in fact those who before the trial maintained that congestion charges would not affect traffic volumes. The three most interesting questions regarding the Stockholm experiences are whether the results are transferable, why the opinion changed contrary to classic transport-economic theory and what the key factors were that led to the trial being viewed as a “success”.
Conclusion
Having to pay for something that used to be free is never popular, and some people will be worse off—especially in the short term, until new travelling habits become gradually adopted. These sacrifices have to be weighed against the positive effects of the charges on the environment and accessibility, and the possibility to use the revenues for necessary investments. Among transport researchers, it is probably not a controversial opinion that congestion charging, all things considered, is a
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