As user charging increasingly supplements taxation as a transport financing mechanismworldwide, the need to measure and understand its distributional impacts across affected groupsgrows more critical. The case of the 185-km Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project in theJohannesburg-Pretoria area of South Africa offers an opportunity to empirically examine theequity impacts of large scale road pricing in middle-income countries. The paper reports on thenovel use of GPS data from multiple sources to assess the distribution of benefits and costs ofelectronic tolling across passenger and freight users. GPS data from commercial truck fleets arecombined with multiday GPS tracks from a panel of private vehicle drivers to derive measuresof user benefit by class. Compared to an alternative hypothecated fuel tax, electronic tolling ismore progressive in terms of both income and vehicle class, as it transfers costs from private tocommercial vehicles, in line with the greater pavement damage caused by trucks. Time-of-daydiscounts favour commercial vehicles, demonstrating how the injudicious application ofdiscounts and exemptions can distort rather than enhance equity in road pricing projects.
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