City centre road user charging; real schemes and field-based experimental studies: State of art

Recently, road user charging (RUC) is considered a suitable tool for tackling urban traffic and transport problems. All over the world, there are different types of road user charging which have been implemented in order to reduce traffic congestion in the centres of the cities. This paper, firstly, focuses on reviewing existing examples of real RUC schemes which are applied to solve congestion traffic problems, such as in Singapore, Durham, London and Dubai. Other cities have used RUC to obtain revenue for new infrastructure funds; for instance, Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim. This paper also discusses a number of field-based RUC experiments that have been done to study the behavioural response towards road charging policy. The sample size of these experiments ranges from twenty three in the Dublin experiment, to thirty seven in Newcastle experiment and five hundred in the Copenhagen experiment, with continuous experimental periods between two weeks to over one year. The results of the existing RUC schemes and field experiment RUC studies indicated that road users might react or act in response to a RUC in several different ways. For instance, some of them prefer to change their departure time to earlier or later to avoid charges. Others change their mode of travel while some of them preferring to choose new destinations for certain activities. The analysis of real RUC schemes and field-based RUC experiments have concluded that RUC could be a powerful instrument in reducing traffic congestion, in raising revenue and in improving the environment in cities centres.