Public acceptability of time-of-day pricing : the New Jersey Turnpike case

Abstract

Time of day pricing reduces the traffic on highway network by discouraging its overuse, especially during peak hours. Public acceptability is one of the important barriers for implementing the congestion pricing. The objective of this paper is to understand the factors or attributes of public that affect their acceptance of the September 2000 time of day pricing initiative that was implemented on the New Jersey Turnpike. Using the methodology of ordinal logit modelling, models were estimated for the respondents' opinions on issues related to travel experience, willingness to pay, and fairness of discounts. Then the final model was selected for each public opinion based on statistical significance and conceptual validity. For the final model selected, sensitivity of the opinion was analyzed for the variables in the model. Results from this study indicate that age had a negative effect on the respondents' opinion about use of toll-revenues for public transit, fairness of discounts to frequent commuters and willingness to pay for faster trip. Education had a positive impact on the issues related to travel experience. Income had a negative effect for impact of tolls on improving traffic condition, while it had a positive impact on issues related to willingness to pay. Owning EZ pass had a positive impact on fairness of EZ pass discounts and willingness to pay for faster trip, while it had a negative effect on use of toll-revenues for public transit improvement.