Essays on second-best pricing schemes for transport infrastructure
- Autores: Aleix Pons i Rigat
- Directores de la Tesis: Mateu Turro Calvet (dir. tes.), Sergi Saurí Marchán (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: inglés
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Pricing has been advocated for a long time as a suitable policy instrument to deal with transport externalities. Recent technological developments enable the implementation of more sophisticated pricing schemes at affordable transaction costs. However, policy makers face numerous constraints and conflicting policy objectives when putting transport pricing schemes into practice. Second-best analysis of specific case studies contributes to translating insights from pricing theory into practical advice in policy design and evaluation. It is in this spirit that this thesis focuses on some critical second-best issues for the definition of transport pricing schemes with three different essays.
There is a strong interdependence between travel behaviour and land use, particularly in urban environments. This causes frictions between pricing instruments to deal with urban transport externalities and other distortions within the urban economy, notably agglomeration economies and urban sprawl.
The first part of the thesis studies this second-best issue in the context of the application of workplace parking policies in Barcelona. The effects on the urban economy of policies addressing current inefficiencies around employer-paid parking are studied through a stylised microeconomic model and a numerical illustration for the metropolitan area of Barcelona. The analytical model indicates that a switch to employee-paid parking has a positive effect on agglomeration economies and urban sprawl, even in dense cities with underground parking facilities. Results from the numerical application suggest that welfare gains from a switch to employee-paid are dominated by agglomeration effects and to a lesser extent by transport and land use effects. The benefits of a workplace parking levy, however, depend on the extent to which costs are passed on to employees.
The implementation of environmental pricing schemes that favour cleaner traction options in mass public transport often faces a classic dilemma: the internalisation of environmental costs by public transport operators might cause a modal shift towards individual transport forms with a higher environmental footprint.
The second part of the thesis analyses this second-best issue for environmental rail access charges in Europe. Current noise and pollution rail charges implemented in Europe are analysed qualitatively in order to determine the extent to which they address second-best best issues of the rail market, including potential modal shifts to road transport and its imperfectly competitive environment. This analysis suggests that the level of environmental surcharges can be generally increased given the relatively low substitutability between rail and road and that the range of abatement possibilities should be enlarged by further differentiating charges.
Whilst road pricing in urban environments is essentially used to deal with urban traffic externalities, the application of road tolls at regional or national scale is often rather seen as a financial instrument. In this sense, the design of road pricing schemes for interurban networks should balance financial and demand management objectives, and consider public acceptability conditions, such as spatial equity.
The last part of the thesis looks into this second-best issue in the context of a road pricing reform in Catalonia. The proposed model and implementation path builds on a study of revenues and costs for the interurban network, and a qualitative analysis of the trade-offs between financial sustainability, mobility management, and spatial equity. The assessment detects a misallocation of costs among road users. The proposed reform defines a two-part tariff pricing and a funding model for interurban roads in Catalonia to correct this misallocation.
