Evaluating the Willingness to Pay for Urban Congestion Priced Zones (Case Study of Tehran)

Congestion pricing is one of the major travel demand management policies to reduce traffic volumes in metropolitans. One of the main factors for effective implementation of this policy is to analyze users’ response to different toll rates. In this paper, the willingness of users to pay for using their personal cars is evaluated. The stated preference method was applied for data gathering. Several pricing scenarios are developed for analyzing the willingness to pay of users, under different scenarios. Travelers’ socio – economic characteristics as well as their trip chains and their mode choice according to different pricing scenarios are gathered by means of a questionnaire that was filled out by more than 4000 respondents. A binary logit model is applied to model choice behavior of users against different price scenarios. Results show that with 50000 Rials toll for Tehran CBD area; 27 percent of users will use their personal cars for entering the congestion priced area. This rate is reduced to 7 percent if the toll increases to 200.000 Rials.