Would You Stick To Using Your Car Even If Charged? Evidence from Trento, Italy

Abstract

Road pricing is becoming increasingly popular among decision‐makers as a policy tool meant to rationalize transport flows in a given area. This paper aims to study modal choice as a function of the personal characteristics of commuters by considering an original data set of more than 9000 commuters in the Trento district of Italy which was collected in 2001. Empirical estimates of drivers' reaction to the introduction of road pricing and to the improvement of the quality of public transport services are provided. It was found that the introduction of a system of road pricing would be far more effective in reducing private car use than an improvement in the speed of public transport. It is also shown that road pricing should be carefully defined, as elderly people and families with children are among those with more inelastic private transport demand.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Juan Carlos Martin Hernandez, Peter Nijkamp, Aura Reggiani, Lanfranco Senn, the participants at the AISRe (Naples, Italy) and Nectar (Las Palmas, Spain) conferences, and three referees for very useful comments. They also thank the Provincia Autonoma di Trento and CerTe for providing the data. The usual disclaimer applies. Financial support from Fondazione CRT and CERTeT Bocconi is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. For a comparison of implementation measures in the UK and Italy, see Ieromonachou et al. (2006).

2. Good examples of stated preference experiments in the case of road pricing are Goodwin (1992) and Wardman (2001). Recently, Small et al. (2005) proposed a methodology that combines both stated and revealed preference data to uncover preference distribution.

3. The unemployment rate in PAT was 3.4% in 2001; that of Italy was 9.1% (PAT, 2006).