Vehicle Restrictions in Four Latin American Cities: Is Congestion Pricing Possible?

Abstract

An exploratory study of the prospects for congestion pricing in four Latin American metropolitan areas where traffic bans currently exist—Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Bogotá—is presented. Through a historical analysis of the implementation process and experience of the traffic bans, along with a snowball‐sampled survey of transportation experts in each city, three factors are found to be the most important to ensure favourable prospects for implementing congestion pricing in these cities: (1) widespread public information regarding the environmental and health risks of traffic congestion and resulting air pollution; (2) implementation of complementary policies such as public transport enhancements and increased parking fees in congested areas; and (3) development of a knowledge culture among politicians and experts through discourse on alternative road pricing policies based on systematic analysis. Among other pertinent issues discussed, the work shows that the equity concerns for low‐income car drivers often cited in discussions on congestion pricing in developed countries are less applicable in the cases studied. A key concern is the lack of political will because it is people with relatively higher incomes and political influence who predominantly own and use cars in these four cities. The findings, though exploratory, are important because the potential of congestion pricing to manage the rapid pace of motorization in the developing world is not well studied. This paper presents an initial step towards studying the implementation of the policy in developing countries.

Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the Integrated Program in Urban, Regional, and Global Air Pollution at MIT in 2004–05. The valuable feedback provided by Ralph Gakenheimer is gratefully acknowledged. The author also thanks Eduardo Vasconcellos and Aaron Golub for information on São Paulo; Jorge Acevedo, Arturo Ardila‐Goméz, Dario Hidalgo, and Germán Lleras in Bogotá; Oscar Figueroa in Santiago de Chile; Alvaro Covarrubias for translating the survey questionnaire into Spanish; Chris Zegras for providing several initial contacts for the survey; and an anonymous reviewer for providing useful comments and additional information that helped improve this paper.

Notes

1. Throughout, wherever the term ‘city’ or the name of a city is used, it refers to the entire metropolitan area.

2. Data are from Secretaría de Transportes y Vialidad del Gobierno del Distrito Federal (SETRAVI) (2000) for Mexico City, Cia do Metropolitano de São Paulo (CMSP) (1998) for São Paulo, Secretaría Interministerial de Planificación de Transporte (SECTRA) and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2001) for Santiago, and The Bogotá Project (2000) for Bogotá.

3. Presentations by contact persons in Santiago, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Bogotá, at the Annual Workshop on Urban and Regional Air Pollution, Mexico City, Mexico, organized by MIT, 18–21 January 2003.

4. Quoting from an email exchange with Oscar Figueroa (October 2004): “The idea of an area based system has been systematically rejected by authorities and by experts. The result is that [the] project has never been approved and probably never will be”. Thus, road pricing appears to be the preferred method for charging approximate marginal social costs on certain roads, varying according to the level of congestion.

5. These numbers are obtained from official origin–destination (O‐D) survey data for the metropolitan area published in 2003 (Diretoria de Planejamento e Expansão dos Transportes Metropolitanos (DM) et al., 2003). According to a reviewer, the O‐D survey data only consider vehicles belonging to households and, hence, result in lower estimates of the number of vehicles. The author found much higher figures for the number of vehicles in São Paulo, for example, in Hochstetler and Keck (2004), where the number was reported to be 6 million in 1999.

6. Jacobi et al. (1999) suggest that this is possibly due to an over‐representation of car owner interests in the press while the users of collective transport‐the major winners in the exercise‐remain less vocal.

7. The State Environmental Secretaríat and CETESB educated people about the rodízio, its operations, rules, and beneficial environmental impacts. Brochures and pamphlets were handed out in public places; celebrities were asked to help spread the message; journalists were openly provided information; and over 3 million phone calls were made to citizens in 1996 as steps to provide extensive environmental education (Secretaría de Estado do Medio Ambiente (SMA), 1997, quoted in Hochstetler and Keck, 2004, p. 28). For measures taken to educate the public about environmental problems in São Paulo, see Jacobi et al. (1999, p. 86).

8. Vasconcellos, personal communication, August 2005, quoting from Avaliação da Operação Rodízio/97 Pela População Metropolitana (1997).

9. A brief description of the policy and its objectives was provided at the start of the questionnaire before respondents proceeded to answer the questions. The question regarding familiarity with congestion pricing helped ensure that a significant percentage of all respondents, 87%, were well informed about the theme of the questionnaire. However, due to sampling limitations the responses to this question are not expected to reflect the actual level of information about congestion pricing among experts in the four cities. The numbers are also not expected to reflect the level of discourse about congestion pricing in each city as the sample sizes are not representative.

10. Some respondents remarked that the lack of political will was related to the lack of alternatives to driving. This is because people who opposed the policy did so because of limited existing alternatives to using their cars, and this opposition from large sections of the populace is what weakens political will.