Transport pricing in practice

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - In the largest worldwide pricing experiment to date, researchers have demonstrated that road users change their behavior when they must pay for the social and environmental effects of their transportation. The study was led by researchers from the University of Basel, ETH Zurich and ZHAW. Transportation causes a variety of costs that individual road users do not have to pay themselves. These external costs include damage to health and the environment caused by pollution, infrastructure costs and time losses incurred by other road users due to congestion. In 2017, external costs of transport in Switzerland ran to more than CHF 13 billion. One approach to reducing these substantial economic costs is the polluter-pays principle. A field experiment, in which about 3,700 people living in urban agglomerations in Frenchand German-speaking Switzerland participated, has now shown that this is both technically possible and effective.