Explaining public acceptance of congestion charging: The role of geographical variation in the Bergen case

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2020.04.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We show how public opinion on congestion charging is differentiated within cities.

  • This differentiation is important, as it could undermine public support.

  • The paper studies Bergen, Norway – an international front-runner in road pricing.

  • We find higher support for congestion charging in boroughs with greater delay reductions.

Abstract

Controversial policies introduced to improve public goods - such as the environment, mobility and public health - have shown patterns of initial opposition followed by broad acceptance once the public experiences positive effects of the policies. In transport policy, congestion charging is one area where such a pattern has been observed, particularly in some high-profile cases like Stockholm and London. However, existing research tends to focus on success cases and aggregate outcomes, and geographical variation in support and opposition is often overlooked. This is problematic because the public opinion on congestion charging appears highly differentiated between different areas of cities, possibly corresponding to perceived misdistribution of costs and benefits. We present a before-after study conducted in connection with the introduction of time-differentiated congestion charging rates in Bergen, Norway, in 2016. We find a substantial reduction of congestion and travel times after the policy’s implementation, but our survey data show no overall increase in policy support after implementation. There is, however, a tendency toward higher support for congestion charging in boroughs with greater delay reductions. We conclude that in securing and maintaining public support for transport measures, the intra-city distribution of costs and benefits is of critical importance.

Introduction

In recent years there have been several high-profile examples of how policies to improve public goods have overcome initial public opposition and achieved broad public acceptance. Examples include policies for the environment, mobility and public health. The banning of indoor smoking in all work places proposed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002 constitutes perhaps the best-known example illustrating how people went from strongly opposing to being satisfied with a controversial policy. Initially, New Yorkers could hardly imagine a society where one could not smoke inside a bar, but accepted the policy change after experiencing its positive effects. Another example is the implementation of a CO2 tax in the Canadian province of British Colombia (Murray and Rivers, 2015). In both cases, initial public skepticism, or outright opposition, turned into increased support post-implementation (Weber, 2015).

The dynamics of public opinion is of significant interest to transport policy, where there are obvious public goods that could be improved through policies related to the environment and public transportation. Congestion charging is one policy area where this pattern of initial opposition turned to broad public acceptance has been observed, particularly in some high-profile cases like Stockholm and London (Hugosson et al., 2006, Transport for London, 2008). Congestion charging is an instrument used in cities to reduce traffic jams by surcharging users at certain times of the day. Higher toll levels at peak hours reduce demand for a scarce resource – road space – by incentivizing drivers to switch to other modes of transportation, driving at other times of the day, or reducing their travel outright. The long-term goal is better accessibility and reduced air pollution (Nordheim et al., 2010).

A range of studies have used Stockholm as a case (Eliasson, 2008, Hysing and Isakson, 2015, Schuitema et al., 2010), showing that people in the city went from opposition to acceptance after witnessing a positive change. This change could not have been properly imagined beforehand, and an unpopular stage was thus necessary to produce an ultimately popular policy. Eliasson found that when people in hindsight were asked what changed their minds about congestion charging, more than half of the people said that they had not changed their minds, even though they had demonstrably done so (Eliasson, 2008). The Stockholm example points to a more general insight about preferences related to new and untested proposals.

Not all congestion charging implementation follow this pattern. The public also rejected a congestion charge proposal in Gothenburg after a consultative referendum based on a trial period in 2013 (Hansla et al., 2017). And congestion charging proposals have in several cities, including Lyon, Hong Kong, Edinburgh, New York and Greater Manchester, been stopped at different stages of the process (Raux and Souche, 2004, Hau, 1990, Confessore, 2008, Hansla et al., 2017). Cases and contextual factors vary significantly, and as Hysing and Isaksson (2015) suggest, local implementation is highly conditional upon these factors.

Therefore, further case studies can enrich our understanding of the links between implementation of congestion charging and the social dynamics of acceptance and opposition. We argue that the existing research on the implementation of congestion charging tends to focus on success cases and aggregate outcomes. This means that some critical factors, particularly geographical variation in support and opposition, are overlooked. This is problematic because the sustainability of the policy regimes is dependent upon stable and broad support, and even minor opposition can constitute significant implementation barriers (Schaller, 2010).

In our case study of congestion charge implementation in Bergen, Norway – an international front-runner in road pricing policy – we use several data types to assess both temporal and geographical variation in public support. This enables us to link changes in public support to the specific boroughs that have experienced reduced congestion after implementation. In turn, that permits a more detailed analysis of the interplays between implementation, public acceptance, and reduced congestion. On this basis, we argue that in implementing congestion charging and other potentially controversial transport policies, the intra-city distribution of costs and benefits is of critical importance.

The article proceeds as follows. In the following section (section 2), we review existing research on congestion charging. Then (section 3) we introduce the case of Bergen, and provide an overview of materials and methods (section 4) used in the research presented. Subsequently we present the results of our empirical analysis (section 5). Finally we discuss our results (section 6) and draw out the broader conclusions of the article (section 7).

Section snippets

Understanding variation in acceptance of congestion charging

In this paper, we count as congestion charging only the systems with time-differentiated rates designed to smooth traffic flows throughout the day. By contrast, toll roads with flat fees are generally intended to raise revenue only and not to affect daily traffic patterns, and we do not count such systems as congestion charging. Congestion charging can potentially mediate several transport problems, particularly related to efficient mobility, health, and the environment. The transport sector is

Congestion charging: the case of Bergen

To better understand the socio-demographic and geographic dynamics of public opinion on congestion charging, we present a before-after study of the introduction of time-differentiated congestion charging rates in Bergen, Norway, in 2016 (Aas, Minken and Samstad, 2009). Toll roads are increasingly used in Norway as part of financing policy packages where state, regional and municipal authorities join forces to solve transport and mobility challenge in the largest cities. In turn, part of the

Traffic measurements

The Norwegian National Public Roads Administration provides traffic information at 5-minute intervals over major stretches of road. For this analysis, we used data between July 2014 and March 2018 for twenty-two stretches of road leading in and out of Bergen. The stretches of road that were selected met several criteria: they had no overlap but combined to provide a representative picture of traffic conditions within and between the boroughs of the city and there were no major breaks or

Impact on traffic congestion

Fig. 1 shows traffic delays4

Discussion

Examining public opinion, we find that aggregate public opinion about time-differentiated road tolls, referred to here as congestion charging, did not change after its introduction, even though congestion was reduced as a direct result. Specifically, we conducted two studies before the introduction of congestion charging in Bergen in February 2016, and three studies after, with no significant differences in means of public opinion between the two groups of studies. This goes against

Conclusions

Congestion charging is a potentially powerful instrument to improve vehicle flow and reduce emissions in cities, but public opposition constitutes a formidable challenge to implementation. In this article we aim to contribute to understanding the question of what explains public opinion on congestion charging, focusing particularly on geographical variation within a city). There have been multiple case studies of cities that have implemented congestion charging or tried to do so, such as

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Kari Elida Eriksen for the map production. We acknowledge funding from the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the University of Bergen under grant no. 10014, funding from the Trond Mohn Foundation (grant no BFS2016REK04), and project funding from NORCE.

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