History
The first published reference to 'road pricing' was possibly in 1949 when the RAND Corporation proposed "use of direct road pricing to make freight journeys more expensive on congested routes or to influence the time of day at which freight traffic operates". Nobel-laureate William Vickrey then built on the ideas of the economist Arthur Pigou, outlining a theoretical case for road pricing in a major work on the subject of 1955 proposing in 1959 that drivers should be charged by electronic means for use of busy urban roads. Arthur Pigou had previously developed the concept of economic externalities in a publication of 1920 in which he proposed that what is now referred to as a Pigouvian tax equal to the negative externality should be used to bring the outcome within a market economy back to economic efficiency.
In 1963 Vickery published a paper 'Pricing in urban and suburban transport’ in the American Economic Review and Gabriel Joseph Roth, John Michael Thomson of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge published a short paper titled "Road pricing, a cure for congestion?". The Smeed Report, 'Road Pricing: The Economic and Technical Possibilities' which had been commissioned in 1962 by the United Kingdom Ministry of Transport was published in 1964. Road pricing was then developed by Maurice Allais and Gabriel Roth in a paper titled "The Economics of Road User Charges" published by the World Bank in 1968.
The first successful implementation of a congestion charge was with the Singapore Area Licensing Scheme in 1976. The Electronic Road Pricing (Hong Kong) scheme operated as a trial between 1983 and 1985 but was not continued permanently due to public opposition. A number of road tolling schemes were then introduced in Norway between 1986 and 1991 in Bergen, Oslo and the Trondheim Toll Scheme. It was noticed that the Oslo scheme had the unintended effect of reducing traffic by around 5%. The Singapore scheme was expanded in 1995 and converted to use a new electronic tolling system in 1998 and renamed Electronic Road Pricing. The first use of a road toll for access by low-occupancy vehicles to high-occupancy vehicle lane was introduced in the U.S. on California State Route 91 in 1995. Since 2000 and other schemes have been introduced although notable the New York congestion pricing and a number of UK proposals were not progressed due to public opposition.
Read more about this topic: Road Pricing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)