Socially Optimal Transport Prices and Markets

Socially Optimal Transport Prices and Markets PDF Author: Todd Litman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
This paper explores the potential of developing more optimal transport prices and markets, and resulting impacts on vehicle travel, consumer costs, environmental and land use impacts, economic development, and social welfare. Optimal pricing must balance economic efficiency, equity and transaction costs. Optimal markets must offer choices and information, minimize distortions, encourage producer competition, and avoid social traps. Current transport prices and markets often fail to meet these criteria. Although distortions may have been justified when transaction costs were high and motor vehicle externalities relatively small, new pricing technologies and increasing concern over external costs justifies increased emphasis on marginal and full-cost pricing, and efforts to eliminate market distortiond. Eleven specific strategies are proposed to create more optimal pricing and markets. These strategies would significanly increase the perceived cost of motor vehicle use while reducing fixed vehicle costs and externalities, increase consumer choices and reduce market distortions. Higher vehicle costs would be offset by reductions in other taxes, consumer expenses, and motor vehicle externalities. Employment, productivity and economic development should increase. Most consumers should benefit verall. Full implementation of those changes is predicted to reduce motor vehicle use by 35%. This indicates that current high levels of automobile use are partly the result of mispricing and market distortions. Consumers reduce automobile travel, given a more optimal market. Current market distortions reduced consumer welfare. Although there are barriers to implementing more optimal pricing and markets, these can be minimized through good planning and management practices which make charges predictable and gradual, maxmize public invlovement, and address specific public concerns.

Socially Optimal Transport Prices and Markets

Socially Optimal Transport Prices and Markets PDF Author: Todd Litman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper explores the potential of developing more optimal transport prices and markets, and resulting impacts on vehicle travel, consumer costs, environmental and land use impacts, economic development, and social welfare. Optimal pricing must balance economic efficiency, equity and transaction costs. Optimal markets must offer choices and information, minimize distortions, encourage producer competition, and avoid social traps. Current transport prices and markets often fail to meet these criteria. Although distortions may have been justified when transaction costs were high and motor vehicle externalities relatively small, new pricing technologies and increasing concern over external costs justifies increased emphasis on marginal and full-cost pricing, and efforts to eliminate market distortiond. Eleven specific strategies are proposed to create more optimal pricing and markets. These strategies would significanly increase the perceived cost of motor vehicle use while reducing fixed vehicle costs and externalities, increase consumer choices and reduce market distortions. Higher vehicle costs would be offset by reductions in other taxes, consumer expenses, and motor vehicle externalities. Employment, productivity and economic development should increase. Most consumers should benefit verall. Full implementation of those changes is predicted to reduce motor vehicle use by 35%. This indicates that current high levels of automobile use are partly the result of mispricing and market distortions. Consumers reduce automobile travel, given a more optimal market. Current market distortions reduced consumer welfare. Although there are barriers to implementing more optimal pricing and markets, these can be minimized through good planning and management practices which make charges predictable and gradual, maxmize public invlovement, and address specific public concerns.

Socially optimal transport prices and markets

Socially optimal transport prices and markets PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
To the degree that prestige, inadequate alternatives or mis- pricing stimulate vehicle travel and sprawl, the resulting transport and land use patterns are suboptimal, and society could benefit overall from policy and planning reforms. [...] It asks, "What amount and mix of travel would people choose if transport and land use policies reflected optimal pricing and planning principles." This analysis defines efficient market principles, identifies transport market distortions and potential reforms, estimates the changes in mobility these reforms would cause, and discusses implications of this analysis to transport policy and planning. [...] It is possible to find examples of both: sidewalks, paths and public transit services that receive little use, resulting in high unit costs, and situations where improved walking and cycling facilities inceased use of these modes, and public transit systems with crowded vehicles and growing ridership. [...] This perspective assumes that the goal is to maximize travel speeds, even if this creates barriers to non-motorized modes (for example, due to wider roads and higher vehicle traffic volumes and speeds) and disperses destinations (for example, due to generous minimum parking requirements which discourage infill development and increase land requirements), and tends to overlook qualitative improveme [...] A survey of Houston, Texas residents (Blueprint Houston 2003) asked, "Would you personally prefer to live in a suburban setting with larger lots and houses and a longer drive to work and most other places, or in a more central urban setting with smaller homes on smaller lots, and be able to take transit or walk to work and other places?" Fifty-five percent of respondents chose the "Central urban s.

Social Optimal Pricing in a Spatial Market

Social Optimal Pricing in a Spatial Market PDF Author: Song-ken Hsu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Book Description


Cars and Carbon

Cars and Carbon PDF Author: Theodoros I. Zachariadis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400721234
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This volume contains articles from leading analysts and researchers on sustainable transportation, who provide critical reflections on how automobile-related climate policies have evolved up to now in Europe and around the world, in view of the widely recognized need to substantially curb global emissions of greenhouse gases in the coming decades. Authors describe the policies which have been most effective, outline their economic and social implications, present success stories while critically reviewing less successful examples, and suggest strategies to decarbonize passenger transportation on a global scale.

Social Costs and Sustainable Mobility

Social Costs and Sustainable Mobility PDF Author: Klaus Rennings
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642576699
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Fair and efficient pricing has become increasingly important in international environmental and transport policy. Thus the valuation and internalization of social costs is now a crucial element within strategies towards sustainable mobility. The book provides methods and results from major European and American studies evaluating both social costs of transport and first experiences with their internalization in different contexts: infrastructure planning, urban road pricing and highway tolling. Additionally, complementary non-monetary instruments for a transition towards sustainable mobility are presented and discussed.

Handbook on Transport Pricing and Financing

Handbook on Transport Pricing and Financing PDF Author: Alejandro Tirachini
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800375557
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Taking a comprehensive approach to two central, closely intertwined themes in the field of transport economics, this illuminating Handbook recognizes the critical socioeconomic importance of transport pricing and financing.

The Full Costs and Benefits of Transportation

The Full Costs and Benefits of Transportation PDF Author: David L. Greene
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642590640
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Modern transportation systems have far-reaching, and serious consequences: deaths and injuries from accidents, pollution of air, water and groundwater, noise congestion, and the greenhouse effect. As world transport systems expand and become increasingly motorised, the transportation community is searching for systems that are both efficient and sustainable. Here, leading international researchers explore the issues and concepts and define the state of knowledge concerning the full costs and benefits of transportation.

Routledge Handbook of Transportation

Routledge Handbook of Transportation PDF Author: Dusan Teodorovic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317630912
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Transportation offers a current and comprehensive survey of transportation planning and engineering research. It provides a step-by-step introduction to research related to traffic engineering and control, transportation planning, and performance measurement and evaluation of transportation alternatives. The Handbook of Transportation demonstrates models and methods for predicting travel and freight demand, planning future transportation networks, and developing traffic control systems. Readers will learn how to use various engineering concepts and approaches to make future transportation safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. Edited by Dušan Teodorović and featuring 29 chapters from more than 50 leading global experts, with more than 200 illustrations, the Routledge Handbook of Transportation is designed as an invaluable resource for professionals and students in transportation planning and engineering.

Measuring the Marginal Social Cost of Transport

Measuring the Marginal Social Cost of Transport PDF Author: Christopher Nash
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080456030
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Many transport economists have for some time proposed marginal social cost as the principle on which prices in the transport sector should be based and, in recent years, their prescription has come to be taken more and more seriously by policy-makers. However, in order to properly test the possible implications of implementing pricing based on marginal social cost and, ultimately, to introduce such a system, it is necessary to actually measure the marginal social costs concerned, and how they vary according to mode, time and context. This book reviews the transport pricing policy debate and reports on the significant advances made in measuring the marginal social costs of transport, particularly through UNITE and other European research projects. We look in turn at infrastructure, operating costs, user costs (both of congestion and of charges in frequency of scheduled transport services) accidents and environmental costs, and how these estimates have been used to examine the impact of marginal cost pricing in transport. We finish by examining how the results of case studies might be generalised to obtain estimates of marginal social costs for all circumstances and, finally, presenting our conclusions.

Social Cost Pricing When Public Transport is an Option Value

Social Cost Pricing When Public Transport is an Option Value PDF Author: Roberto Roson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A well-known principle of welfare economics states that an efficient resources allocation can be achieved in a competitive economy when market prices are in line with social marginal costs. When applied to the transport sector, this implies that the price of the various transport modes should be made equal to the sum of marginal production and external costs, like congestion, accidents, pollution, and road maintenance. It is sometimes argued that the internalisation of external costs would bring about a change in demand patterns with a shift towards public transport and cleaner modes. But, public transport is already favoured by a discriminatory fiscal treatment. Whereas public services are normally (heavily) subsidised, private transport is taxed in several ways and, in some countries, quite substantially so. The application of the ioptimal pricingi principle, therefore, critically depends on how the subsidisation of public services is interpreted. This paper addresses the issue of optimal pricing of urban transport, using different hypotheses about the treatment of public services. After reviewing some traditional arguments in favour of public transport subsidisation, a new approach, based on uncertainty and option values, is discussed. The implications of this approach are investigated by means of an applied model, where optimal prices for urban transport services in the city of Bologna are computed under alternative assumptions.