About CIHT CIHT Governance President's Blog Diversity & Inclusion CIHT Foundation

Charging for Road Use: What is the Future of Mobility Pricing

Charging for Road Use – What is the Future of Mobility Pricing is a new CIHT White Paper produced with the support of Bentley Systems. It reviews the many ways that drivers are paying directly for using roads in different parts of the world and how this supports a variety of transport policy goals including reducing congestion, improving air quality and driving down carbon emissions.

Get ahead with CIHT Membership

Join other savvy professionals just like you at CIHT. We are committed to fulfilling your professional development needs throughout your career

Find out more

In the UK, similar policies have often been difficult to deliver, as the recent controversy around London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone and Cambridge’s failed attempt to introduce congestion charging demonstrate.

The White Paper argues that the lesson from around the world is that to overcome these difficulties the transportation profession needs to develop its capability to develop schemes that address three interlinked sets of questions:

Policy: what is the rationale for introducing charges for road use, what problems is it intended to help solve, and what other policies need to be in place to achieve these goals?

Practical: how will the scheme be designed, under what kind of business model will it operate, what technology options flow from these choices, what data will be needed, and how will it be collected and managed?

Political: what will make the proposal viable in its specific political and legal context, and what communications and public engagement requirements flow from this analysis?

Mark Coates, Bentley Systems Vice President of Infrastructure Policy Advancement and co-author of the paper with CIHT’s Andrew Crudgington said,

The ball is in our court. Advances in technology and data are opening up exciting new opportunities to use charging to solve out transport problems but the profession needs to step-up and make the case in a way that makes sense to politicians and the public.

To kick-start this process, the White Paper challenges colleagues to engage with the authors to tackle a series of practical questions including:

How can we make better use of the enormous volumes of data generated by the circa 40 million vehicles on UK roads to better manage use of road space through charging?
How in the UK’s centralised political system can we draw on the USA’s state-level experience that buyin can be generated by introducing opt-in charging schemes that offer drivers a more attractive deal than current taxes?
How can we put user choice of how and when to pay at the centre of future charging schemes