Le développement de la circulation routière est, en Europe, une caractéristique majeure du secteur des transports depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale. L’accroissement du niveau de vie moyen et du taux d’équipement des ménages a permis au plus grand nombre d’accéder au déplacement en voiture particulière. Comme, dans le même temps, le trafic routier de marchandises a connu une progression tout aussi vive, nous avons assisté à une course de vitesse entre la croissance des trafics routiers et les progrès quantitatifs et qualitatifs de la voirie. Ce mouvement a pris des formes diverses. Certains pays, qui connaissaient un retard sensible en matière de réseau routier, notamment au sud de l’Europe, ont opté pour la mise en place de péages dont l’intérêt principal était de réduire le poids pour les finances publiques des investissements routiers. D’autres pays ont développé, plus ou moins selon les cas, leur réseau routier par le seul recours aux dépenses publiques. Au-delà de ces différences nationales, chacun se trouve confronté aux mêmes interrogations : faut-il encore développer le réseau routier ? Et, quelle que soit la réponse, comment sensibiliser l’usager de la voirie aux coûts qu’il engendre pour la collectivité ? La question de la tarification de l’usage des infrastructures routières se trouve ainsi clairement posée.
The European Commission regularly submits White papers that all stress the need to change the price of road usage in order to As these base it on fairer and more efficient criteria. transformations may not be widely accepted, because of acceptability problems, have been specific studies on the general topic of equity them, which has initiated. In the report of one of PATS consortium been conducted within the (Price Acceptability in Transport Systems), the authors clearly show that road pricing cannot be assimilated to the pricing of any good. Indeed freedom of movement is one of the basic values of Western democracies. Moreover, people and goods mobility is required for economic principle of growth to occur. Beyond the economic have to be taken optimisation, other requirements creation of road into account for so that the pricing is accepted as far as political, social and institutional criteria are concerned.
In this paper an analytical framework on acceptability of transport pricing changes is applied to a tolled Northern ring road scheme in the Lyons urban area. The analytical framework is built upon the confrontation of economic efficiency (efficient demand management), territorial equity (guarantee of accessibility), horizontal equity (user-pays principle), and vertical equity (welfare of those less favoured). This framework in then applied to TEO case study, a tolled urban motorway opened in 1997, in addition with free-flow capacity restrictions on parallel roads. It followed from these schemes an important protest, which leads the authorities to greatly decrease the toll on this road. The dimensions of efficiency and equity at stake in this scheme are analysed and illustrated with quantitative results. The way these dimensions combined and reinforced themselves in their negative aspects is shown.
When it comes to developing car urban traffic, policy makers are faced with critical challenges: urban, financial, environmental, but also social and political. To the latter, economists have been answering for a long time with solutions that seem simple and obvious to them. External costs of car traffic, and particularly congestion costs, are mainly due to an almost non-existence of pricing. As a result, the latter has to be reconsidered. However, contrary to what traditional analyses of the problem suggest, economic rationale runs into the ambivalence of the goals pursued by urban toll. Should new roads be financed and built, or should the overall traffic be significantly reduced? The first goal, more appropriate for inter-city traffic, has progressively been left out in urban areas by the concept of urban toll, which comes up with unexpected ideas such as speed reduction or even the creation of a market for negotiable permits to circulate. These multiple forms of toll explain why the current pricing policies of urban roads are hesitating.
The Alps are particularly sensitive to the environmental aggressions of transport activities. This is why they were an important regional issue in the OECD study on "Environmentally Sustainable Transport" (EST). Four scenarios have been designed and quantified to evaluate, through a back-casting approach, the EST in the Alps in 2030. The "Business As Usual" scenario is the reference for the evaluation. It clearly shows that current trends in the transport development in the Alps bring the system far away from sustainability. Three EST scenarios describe the range of possibilities and the space for decision making towards sustainability. EST 1 investigates the sole technology axis; EST 2, the sole transport demand management axis; the third scenario, EST 3, one combination (among many others) of the two axis. EST 3 shows that sustainability is indeed achievable combining technological breakthroughs, nowadays foreseeable, with changes in the future organisation of the transport system, which are acceptable from the social and economic viewpoints. This article investigates three aspects of the study: the methodological issues; the projections for the four scenarios; the issues related to the feasibility and acceptability of the necessary policies measures to achieve EST3 scenario.