Research On The Effectiveness Evaluation Method Of Congestion Pricing

In recently years, with the increment of urbanization and then the rapid growth of motor vehicles, traffic congestion has become a common ’urban disease’ in the world. Of various kinds of traffic management and control measures, Congestion pricing (CP) is considered to be an effective method for alleviating urban traffic pressure. From the angle of economics, CP can internalize the external diseconomies of traffic congestion, rationalize the urban traffic space-time structure, and also promote the development of urban public transport. As a kind of traffic policy, CP has been implemented in Singapore, London, Stockholm, New York, Toronto and some other cities successfully. At the same time, some cities in our country, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu, are carrying their preparatory work for possible CP execution plan in the future.CP, a complex project contains lots of influence factors, and its implementation should be treated as a dynamic process. In the entire executing process, the effectiveness of CP should be assessed in various stages so that some improvement and adjustment measures can be applied accordingly. Therefore, research on developing a reasonable evaluation method to assess the effectiveness of urban congestion pricing strategy is of major importance.In this study, overseas and domestic research status about the effectiveness evaluation of CP is analyzed, the main deficiency lies in their one-sidedness of evaluation perspective, and it is obvious for such work to give unreasonable and unpersuasive evaluation results. To fill this gap, some key characteristics of CP in urban central area are extracted by comparing the CP performance in three representative cities (London, Stockholm and Singapore), and on this basis, a comprehensive evaluation index system for assess the effectiveness of CP is constructed in this paper, this index system contains three target layer, three indicator category (public participation, traffic impact and social benefit), and sixteen indicators.Finally, by adopting the superiority evaluation theory, an extenics-based evaluation method for assess the effectiveness of CP in urban central area is built and accordingly the effectiveness rating criteria is put forward. In the implementation part, the CP schemes in Stockholm is selected as our case, the evaluation results obtained are analyzed to evaluate the CP’s synthesize impacts on Stockholm, and naturally, the reasonability and of the set of comprehensive evaluation indexes and the availability of the extenics-based evaluation method are verified respectively.