Analysing the design criteria of charging cordons

The idea of the efficient use of roads, which requires users to pay for the traffic congestion cost that they impose on an urban road network, is long established (Pigou, 1920; Walters, 1961). However, the gap between the constructive theory of road pricing and its real world application is significant due to the issue of public acceptance, technical feasibility, and the cost of implementation (Sharp, 1966; Verhoef et al, 1995; Stenman and Sterner, 1998; and Sumalee, 2000). Different charging regimes have been developed and studied including time or delay based charging, distance based charging, cordon or boundary based charging, and area based charging (Holland and Watson, 1978; May, 1992; Oldridge, 1990; Smith et al, 1994; and Ison, 1998). The cordon charging system is the core of the study in this paper where we are looking for criteria for the judgmental design of cordons. We use the term “judgmental cordon design” to describe the process to identify the best locations to levy the charges and specify the optimal charge levels based on professional judgment.

This paper reviews the literature to identify design criteria in section 2, and then it describes a survey with six UK local authorities in section 3. Section 4 presents the results of the survey and finally section 5 discuss the results and draw the conclusions.