The impact of congestion charging on car ownership: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment
Urban Vehicle Access Regulations are experiencing a resurgence in interest as practitioners grapple with prominent challenges, such as traffic safety, poor air quality, and inadequate liveability in cities. Congestion charging is one variant of such regulations, initially designed to minimise recurrent congestion formation and also holding the potential to produce ancillary impacts. The ability of congestion charging to discourage the ownership of private cars is an ancillary impact that has comparatively received limited research attention despite a direct relation to congestion. This study focusses on this gap by applying a quasi-natural experiment using the London Congestion Charge as a case study. Spatial variants of difference-in-difference models are applied to identify the causal impact of the congestion charge policy on private car registrations. In treatment group locations outside of the congestion charge boundary, the analysis indicates that private car registrations reduced by 6.95% following the introduction of the policy. The findings of this analysis could be helpful to policymakers considering the introduction of Urban Vehicle Access Regulations by providing quantitative evidence of some of the broader impacts such policies generate.
Funding
DfT Decarbonising Transport ESRC Policy Fellowship
Economic and Social Research Council
Find out more...History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Transport PolicyVolume
160Pages
181 -191Publisher
Elsevier LtdVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© Elsevier LtdPublisher statement
This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Acceptance date
2024-10-31Publication date
2024-11-01Copyright date
2024ISSN
0967-070XeISSN
1879-310XPublisher version
Language
- en