Who should pay? Public acceptance of different means for funding transport infrastructure

This paper examines acceptance of different ways to fund transport infrastructure. Our methodological approach, stemming from social psychology (attitudes), is based on latent variables. We differentiate between three types of explanatory variables: socioeconomic, (material) self-interest, and personal values. This approach has previously been used to study acceptance of congestion charges, but not (to our knowledge) acceptance of funding alternatives. We conclude that the funding alternatives that are less economically efficient (more deadweight loss per revenue) are unfortunately often the most attractive according to the public. User charges on new infrastructure are popular but might lead to sub-optimal use (since it leads to under usage of the new infrastructure). If charges are also applied to parallel infrastructure, the problem with suppressed demand is reduced, but so is acceptance. VAT (low deadweight loss) is unpopular, whereas income tax (higher deadweight loss) is more accepted. Therefore, politicians will need to handle tradeoffs between acceptance and efficiency. Possible solutions might be found in acceptance theory or by bundling measures. We also find that both context-specific self-interest and broader personal values explain individuals’ preferences towards different funding forms. In many cases the two types of independent variables are highly correlated since variables indicating self-interest against a specific funding form contribute to the formation of general personal values, too. Our results seem to indicate, however, that the explanatory power of more general personal values is larger than that of context-specific self-interest.