A Public Acceptance Survey of Congestion Relief Policies Across Latin America.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Bogota, Colombia
Caracas, Venezuela
Fortaleza, Brazil
La Paz, Bolivia
Lima, Peru
Mexico City, Mexico
Montevideo, Uruguay
Panama City, Panama
Quito, Ecuador
Support for market-based and command-and-control congestion relief policies in Latin American cities: Effects of mobility, environmental health, and city-level factors
Summary Information
Urban traffic congestion imposes enormous costs on society ranging from lost hours of productivity to decreased air quality. To reduce these burdens, municipalities have increasingly tried to tame congestion through a variety of policies known as congestion relief policies.
Congestion relief policies typically take one of two forms. Either they are “command and control” policies which impose strict limits on who can drive when or they are congestion pricing based policies which charge users fees for driving.
Based on their analysis the research team offered a number of suggestions for effectively implementing congestion relief policies such as congestion pricing. Which are:
- Clearly communicate with the public about how congestion pricing will be spent and seek to spend these revenues on improving public transit.
- Emphasize the air quality benefits of congestion relief policies as “these benefits are widely distributed…and are likely to be well-received.”
- Account for income inequality which may “impact perceptions of policy fairness and desirability.”
- Use pilot programs to test the viability of congestion relief policies.
