Acceptability of transport pricing strategies
Dresden, Germany, May 23 - 24, 2002

Acceptance of pricing systems is one of the important factors in managing new technology in transport. If acceptance is not taken into consideration the risk of ruinous investments in this policy arises. Since the early nineties, many studies of the acceptability of transport pricing systems have been conducted or are still on the way (on EU-level e.g. MIRO, TransPrice, AFFORD, PRIMA, PATS, CUPID). The results are rather unanimous: Empirical findings have shown that in general (public and political) acceptability of pricing measures is low.

The empirical results raise several questions:

• How to explain the different levels of public acceptance of various travel demand management measures?
• Which factors influence the degree of acceptability? And following from this
• How should a phased approach look like from the point of view of acceptability of pricing strategies?

However, most of the past projects dealt with acceptability of various pricing strategies by measuring the rates of acceptance (and of variables behind) with acceptance surveys. But the predictive value of this approach might be rather low, above all if the surveys are dealing with hypothetical future innovations people have no experience with. As 10 years of practical experience in Norway show acceptance afterwards might be higher than (hypothetical) acceptability before it is introduced. One of the reasons behind the scientific problems of prediction in this field is the lack of a commonly shared theoretical and methodological framework validly and reliably describing and explaining the phenomenon "acceptance", its correlates and important variables behind.

Thus, the first aim of the proposed international conference is a contribution to an interdisciplinary scientific exchange which covers all relevant aspects of acceptance, integrating economic, psychological, sociological and political points of views. One result should be a commonly agreed theoretical and methodological framework for acceptance studies in different transportation related fields or at least the discussion of different approaches on a high level. The second aim of the planned transport pricing acceptability conference is to deal with the lack of public and political acceptability, to bring together the most advanced state of the art and to propose forthcomings and possible solutions as basis for a phased approach towards marginal cost pricing. It addresses all institutions and interested parties who work on this topic within the scope of implementing innovative measures for the transport sector. An exchange of knowledge about applied theories and methods shall be encouraged and therefore build a basis for the future realisation of valid acceptance studies and of successful implementation strategies.

The conference should serve among other things

• to bring together state-of-the-art knowledge,
• to provoke an exchange between different research fields and disciplines as well as between transport experts and academics,
• to stimulate and encourage new and innovative approaches,
• to lead to a well reasoned phased approach and to an intelligent marketing strategy for the implementation of road pricing.

For further information, please contact:

Jens Schade
Dresden University of Technology
Traffic and Transportation Psychology
01062 Dresden
Tel.: +49 (0) 351 / 463 36682
E-Mail: schade∂verkehrspsychologie-dresden.de
Internet: http://www.mcicam.net/