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The impact of congestion charging on car ownership: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-02-04, 12:35 authored by Craig MortonCraig Morton, Yasir AliYasir Ali

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

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History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Transport Policy

Volume

160

Pages

181 -191

Publisher

Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© Elsevier Ltd

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2024-10-31

Publication date

2024-11-01

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0967-070X

eISSN

1879-310X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Craig Morton. Deposit date: 26 November 2024

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