طرح های شهری قیمت گذاری برای مهار آلودگی در میلان، ایتالیا: توضیحات، اثرات و ارزیابی تجزیه و تحلیل هزینه فایده اولیه

Starting from January 2008 Milan implemented a charging scheme to enter an 8 km2 area of the city centre. The term used to denote the scheme is Ecopass, conveying the stated political objective of the scheme: a pass to improve the quality of the urban environment (ECO). The charge depends on the Euro emission standard of the vehicle. The paper illustrates the main features and impacts of the Milan Ecopass scheme, and presents a preliminary cost–benefit analysis. The scheme has been effective in curbing not only pollution emissions, but also congestion, and the result has been achieved with low implementation costs and without major political opposition. The cost–benefits analysis presents an overall net benefit. The identification of the winners and losers of the policy is conditioned by penalty payments. Without including the penalties, the surface public transport users and the society at large are the main winners, whereas car and especially freight vehicle users are net losers.

Following the recent introduction in London and Stockholm, starting from January 2008, an urban road pricing has been introduced in Milan, Italy. The gain in popularity of road pricing schemes among decision makers in Europe has come after transport economists had long advocated road pricing as a socially beneficial policy (Pigou, 1920, Vickrey, 1963, Vickrey, 1969 and Walters, 1961). However, many issues are still controversial both at a theoretical and empirical level. At a theoretical level, road pricing has proved to be a welfare-increasing policy which, when jointly planned with network capacity provision, can significantly strengthen the financial sustainability and cost-effectiveness of road infrastructure investments. However the first-best, link-based, partial-equilibrium road-pricing model, which requires each road user to pay a price equal to the value of the congestion delay imposed on all other users, represents a mere benchmark solution and its real world implementation raises numerous theoretical, technical, social, and political issues. These have been addressed in many second- and third-best models (see, e.g., Tsekeris and Voß, 2008, Small and Verhoef, 2007, de Palma et al., 2006, Lindsey, 2006 and Santos, 2004). From an empirical point of view, the number of real world implementations is yet far too small and too case specific to allow the scientific community to draw definite conclusions. Yet, some empirical evidence does exist. The literature on the recent London and Stockholm schemes shows that road pricing: • is effective in reducing congestion and, consequently, travel times (Transport for London, 2003, Transport for London, 2007 and Eliasson et al., 2009); • causes a modal shift toward public transport and non-motorised modes; • improves, as a side effect, the urban and environmental quality of the urban areas where it is implemented (Banister, 2003); • is financially beneficial for the local authorities that implement it; • does not always raise public discontent and can be politically accepted; • does provide substantial toll revenues to the local administration who can allocate them according to the political agreement with its constituency; and • can be a progressive tax in its own right, before any compensation scheme is implemented (Santos and Rojey, 2004, p. 38). The scheme applied in Milan provides yet another possibility to test the various issues at stake. The term Ecopass summarises the meaning and the stated political objective of the scheme: a pass to improve the air quality of the city (eco). The literature shows that the final results of the implemented policies depend on how they are tailored to the specific characteristics of the city and on the specific objectives pursued. No easy and robust generalization is possible, as is often the case in social sciences. However, the examination of the Milan Ecopass scheme – an important scheme since, in Italy, Milan is the second largest metropolitan area in terms of population, and the most important in terms of wealth – can provide further useful evidence on the advantages and disadvantages of a road pricing policy in an urban agglomeration. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 illustrates the characteristics of the Milan Ecopass scheme. Section 3 illustrates its main short-term impacts on pollution, the number and type of circulating vehicles, congestion, trip scheduling, modal transfer and toll revenue. Section 4 presents a preliminary cost–benefit analysis based on available data in order to compare it with those performed for London and Stockholm. Section 5 summarises the main results and discussed the future prospects. Throughout the paper, comparisons will be made with the schemes implemented in London and Stockholm, and, to a lesser degree, in Singapore.

Road pricing is a historically central theme for transport economics, promoted in particular by Pigou in the 1920s and by the Smeed Report in the 1960s (Smeed, 1964). After a period of decreasing interest, it had a recent revival thanks to its adoption in London and Stockholm and, at interurban level, in the United States. To the list of relevant applications, starting from January 2008, one should add Milan. This paper has focused on describing and evaluating the impact and the efficiency of the scheme adopted in Milan. The Milan application has very specific characteristics which have been described in detail in Section 2 and compared with those of other large cities such as London and Stockholm. It has been shown that the Milan Ecopass scheme, more than on congestion, focused on pollution, given the relevance of this issue for the city. This has led to the introduction of a highly differentiated toll in terns of emission technology but with little or no differentiation in terms of congestion. Moreover, the toll was set at a quite low average level. The results obtained are nonetheless significant both in terms of pollution, congestion and modal shift. They can be compared to those of London that adopted a toll twice as high. A side effect is that the toll revenue collected in Milan is relatively modest, and slightly less than expected by local authorities. From the technical and political point of view, the complex tariff structure could have caused acceptability and implementation problems. Overall, this appears not to have been the case to a considerable extent: the technical issues were dealt with successfully, and the implementation costs were kept at a very low level compared to the other European cases. Informal sources, however, indicate that the penalty payments are strikingly high. Although their causes have not been explored yet, one may conceive them as signalling an implementation and communication issue. Overall, however, one might claim that Milan Ecopass scheme has been a technical and political success: it decreased congestion and pollution and increased bus and tram patronage. In fact, the Milan Ecopass scheme, presented by the politicians as experimental for the year 2008, has recently been extended, still as being experimental, to the year 2010. From the economist point of view, this does not suffice: it is necessary to compare costs with benefits and understand how they are distributed among the public and private actors that live and operate within the urban area. Making use of the valuation framework applied to the LCCS, in Section 4 we produced a preliminary efficiency analysis of the Milan Ecopass scheme. Given the recent introduction of the scheme and the scarcity of the available data (yet to be collected or estimated), the analyses should be considered as preliminary. However, we think it is interesting both from a methodological point of view and because it shows the critical aspects of the Milan Ecopass scheme on which more attention should be paid. The main result is that, even not including the penalties, there are net losses both for passenger transport and especially for freight transport since the toll scheme imposes much of the burden on freight vehicles, which belong to the more polluting vehicle engine classes. The largest social benefits appear to be linked mostly to decreased congestion and a reduction in accidents more than to the environmental benefits, albeit that this was the stated objective of the policy. As far as public finances are concerned, notwithstanding the low implementation costs, the modest toll revenue (not considering the penalty revenue which might be transitory) generates the need to collect further public funds to implement the planned mix of policies. Furthermore, one has to fear that the effectiveness of the policy will be reduced in the medium run due to the increased substitution rate induced in the fleet of private vehicles. This will, on the one hand, help to reach the environmental goal, but on the other hand will lead to a decreased effectiveness of the policy instrument (on congestion) and to reduced toll revenues. Consequently, it would be advisable, in order to strengthen the effectiveness of the policy, to extend the area of application, as was done in London, or as applied in the first instance by Stockholm, with a tolled area five times larger than in Milan. From the analytical point of view, the cost–benefit analysis of the Milan Ecopass scheme would require better information and estimates regarding: (a) the VTTS per trip purpose, per trip user, per income level, per origin/destination, (b) the vehicle-kms by speed categories within and outside the area for the scenarios with and without the Ecopass; and (c) the effects on localization of economic activity. All in all, however, it seems to us that the introduction of the Milan Ecopass scheme is a courageous policy. On the basis of the available data, it was both effective and efficient. One relevant issue is its effectiveness in the medium run. Politicians have, consequently, a difficult task: to continuously find a good balance between acceptability and efficiency. In so doing communication skills are important, however, they should be based, in our view, on an in-depth knowledge of the various economic aspects that we tried to focus on in this paper, in particular: the effects of an extension of the charging area, the effects of the rate of substitution of the vehicles, and the effects of any change in the pricing scheme on the congestion levels prevailing outside the charging area.