The paper analyzes the political acceptability of policies targeted at relieving urban congestion. The paper combines a stylized model of an urban transport network with a somewhat more detailed model of the political process that incorporates interactions between voters, special interest groups...

This paper considers various policy measures that governments can use to reduce traffic externalities in cities. Unlike much of the available literature that emphasized congestion, we focus on measures that reduce pollution, noise and some accident risks. These measures include noise barriers,...

We study the competition of two suburbs that are facing transit traffic flows. We show that in the absence of toll measures, the Nash equilibrium leads to a race to the top in traffic calming, except for the measures that do not affect the generalized cost of traffic. The Nash equilibrium is...

This paper discusses investments in transport infrastructure and incentives for commuting taxes in a multiregional setting. We study the horizontal and vertical interactions between governments. We identify incentives for strategic and tax exporting behavior that might lead to underinvestment in...

This paper considers various policy measures to reduce traffic externalities in cities, including externality-reducing investments, tolls, emission standards, low emission zones, and bypass capacity to guide traffic around the city center. Using a simple model that distinguishes local and...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the interaction between pricing and capacity decisions on simple serial and parallel transport networks. When individual links of the network are operated by different regional or national authorities, toll and capacity competition is likely to result....

In this paper, we consider a region that invests in infrastructure used by both local demand and through transport. We then compare transport systems that have, for a given capacity, the same total infrastructure cost but vary in the proportion of fixed costs and variable capacity costs. We...

This paper analyzes how countries with international and local truck traffic decide to switch from a simple fuel tax system to a dual system of fuel and kilometer taxes. We show what drives a country to switch and how this affects the level of fuel taxes and the incentives for the other...

In this paper, we use a simple majority voting model to study the introduction of urban congestion tolls. The model allows for different types of uncertainty and considers different uses of the toll revenues. The following results are obtained. First, we show that individual uncertainty with...

In this paper, we explore energy efficiency policies in the presence of a global environmental problem and international cost interdependency associated with R&D activities. We develop a simple model with two regions where the cost of an appliance in one region depends upon the level of energy...