Experience with Measuring Equity and Efficiency: A Case from Oslo
Road pricing has been discussed in the context of two objectives: improving resource allocation and financing the expansion of the capacity of the road network. Financing transport infrastructure by means of toll revenues in the traditional sense has a hi
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Experience with Measuring Equity and Efficiency: A Case from Oslo
Farideh Ramjerdi, Knut Østmoe± and Harald Minken TØI, Institute of Transport Economics, the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research, Oslo, Norway
Abstract Road pricing has been discussed in the context of two objectives: improving resource allocation and financing the expansion of the capacity of the road network. Financing transport infrastructure by means of toll revenues in the traditional sense has a history that dates back almost 70 years in Norway. Since 1986, with the opening of cordon toll schemes in Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim, and more recently in Stavanger there has been a major shift in the location of tollfinanced projects from peripheries to urban areas. Meanwhile, the contribution from toll financing schemes to the total funds for transport infrastructure has increased by more than 35 percent and the scheduled projects for financing by tolls are almost complete. It is apparent that the Norwegian tolls have successfully achieved their purposes. The Norwegian tolls are approved for only a limited period of time, usually 15 years. There is now a growing interest in redefining the objectives of some of the Norwegian urban tolls from merely a financing scheme to a part of an integrated policy package that would address transport externalities. This chapter will discuss the performances of the Norwegian urban tolls and the issues related to their changing roles.
7.1 Introduction Issues of equity in transport have received extensive attention, especially more recently related to congestion pricing. This body of research has different focuses. Some address the distributions of economic gains and losses among different groups of users, usually by income, and suggest how to calculate these. Others have focused on alternative schemes for redistribution of the toll revenues in order to address equity concerns. Still others have focused on the identification of different stakeholders such as consumers, producers and operators, and subgroups among stakeholders that are affected differently by a policy. See Eliasson and
This study was partly supported through the SPECTRUM project under the EU 5th framework programme. Arild Vold has calculated the scenarios using RETRO. ±
After this chapter was written Knut Østmoe has died.
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F. Ramjerdi, K. Østmoe and H. Minken
Lundberg (2002) for a survey. A few studies address the quantification of inequality formally. Among these are the EU-funded research projects AFFORD, MCICAM and PROSPECTS (see Fridstrøm, et al. 2000; Minken et al., 2002; MCICAM, 2003). The efficiency and equity of a toll scheme have most often been discussed while looking at the transport sector in isolation. There are, however, interactions between the transport sector and the rest of the economy, and there are distortions in the rest of the economy. Due to these distortions, the secondary effects of transport policies on the rest of the economy are relevant and should be evaluated. In a general equilibrium framework, these interac
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