This paper makes two important contributions to the body of literature documenting the impact of pricing on freight transportation. First, it compares responses to various pricing strategies and models the willingness-to-pay by freeway, truck lane, cordon or mileage-based pricing. Second, it compares the willingness-to-pay by evaluating the likelihood of switching to a different route or to time period.

This work relies on a survey effort conducted in the Southern California Association of Government (SCAG) region. Respondents that control decision-making for commercial vehicles were recruited and asked to describe their current travel decisions as well as their responses to road pricing. A total of 1,200 establishments that controlled either route or time-of-day or both decisions were recruited. The sampling frame included respondents from carriers, shippers, receivers and service providers.

The survey was conducted in two separate phases. In the first phase, establishments were recruited for the stated preference (SP) survey and information for their most common trip was collected using a computer-aided telephone interview (CATI). During the second phase, customized choice experiments were developed using the information collected from the CATI survey and the resulting SP survey was administered over the web.

Four types of stated preference experiments were administered to capture responses to facility, lane, cordon and mileage-based pricing. A range of values describing the willingness-to-pay for route and time-of-day choice were developed using choice models. Results indicate that the willingness-to-pay varies by type of decision (route or time-of-day), the land use at both trip ends and the pricing strategy under evaluation. The estimated values of time can be used to evaluate diversion from peak period in response to pricing and to modify “static” trip tables.

This commercial vehicle research study is the first of its kind in that it evaluates and compares preferences across different pricing policy strategies. Most importantly, this comprehensive effort can serve as a blueprint for other regions interested in evaluating one or more commercial vehicle pricing strategies.