Titelaufnahme

Over the last couple of years, Europe’s metropolitan areas have grown enormously. As a consequence, the congestion in the cities is increasing immensely. The particulates limits in Austria have been exceeded repeatedly in the recent years. Despite exceeding the particulates limits, Austria has taken little measures in transportation to reduce the fine dust pollution so far. The road transport generates social costs in the form of wear and tear on the roads as well as emissions. These negative effects are called external costs. One of the most popular regulations politics use to internalize many of those negative effects is road pricing. Many countries use road pricing to finance expensive traffic objects, such as tunnels or bridges. For example, Austria collects charges for the use of motorways to achieve a fair distribution of traffic costs. Urban road pricing, more commonly known as congestion charge, has been rarely implemented in practice so far. Singapore implemented the world’s first congestion charge in 1975. Since the eighties Norway has also been using urban road pricing as transport political instrument. London and Stockholm have been charging city tolls for vehicles driving in the innercity areas. A lot of other European cities want to implement city tolls in the future. In Austria and Germany congestion charges have been mainly discussed by The Green Party. Due to the relevance of the topic, because of the increasing challenges of transport in urban areas, I chose to approach the issue of congestion charge in my master thesis. This paper compares two successfully implemented congestion charging systems in Europe in order to analyze the core points of this traffic device and to develop recommendations for a possible introduction of a congestion charge in other countries.