Fundamental Study on New Road Pricing Format from the Perspective of Acceptability

摘要

Road pricing (RP) is regarded as the most effective measure to solve the traffic congestion in urban areas, but the difficulty of forming a consensus among the stakeholders has become an obstacle to the implementation of RP in Japan. Nagoya University has proposed a "Parking Deposit System" (PDS) as a new form of road pricing to which the public would be greatly receptive, and is studying the possibility of implementing such a system through industry-government-academia collaboration. In 2008 the university intends to conduct a pilot program in the city of Nagoya prior to implementation to verify empirically the acceptability and benefits of introducing PDS. Ahead of this program, a questionnaire survey of visitors to downtown Nagoya was conducted in November 2006 (1,248 samples collected) to ascertain the acceptability of PDS. This paper discusses a) the advantages of PDS from an acceptability perspective and b) changes in travel behavior stemming from PDS, as indicated by the survey results.