This paper summarizes the traffic effects of the Gothenburg congestion charges introduced in 2013. The system is similar to the system introduced in Stockholm in 2006; both are designed as time-of-day dependent cordon pricing systems. We find that many effects and adaptation strategies are similar to those found in Stockholm, indicating a high transferability between smaller and larger cities with substantial differences in public transport use. However, there are also important differences regarding some of the effects, the accuracy of the model forecasts and public support arising from different topologies, public transport use, congestion levels and marketing of the congestion charges to the public. Finally, the Gothenburg case suggests that whether congestion charges are introduced or not depends on the support among the political parties, and that this is determined primarily by the prevailing institutional setting and power over revenues, and to a lower extent by the public support, and benefits from congestion reduction.

Road freight transport is believed by many to be the first transport domain in which driverless (DL) vehicles will have a significant impact. However, in current literature almost no attention has been given to how the diffusion of DL trucks might occur and how it might affect the transport system. To make predictions on the market uptake and to model impacts of DL truck deployment, valid cost estimates of DL truck operations are crucial. In this paper, an analysis of costs and cost structures for DL truck operations, including indicative numerical cost estimates, is presented. The total cost of ownership for DL trucks compared with that for manually driven (MD) trucks has been analyzed for four different truck types (16-, 24-, 40-, and 64-ton trucks), for three scenarios reflecting pessimistic, intermediate, and optimistic assumptions on economic impacts of driving automation based on current literature. The results indicate that DL trucks may enable substantial cost savings compared with the MD truck baseline. In the base (intermediate) scenario, costs per 1,000 ton-kilometer decrease by 45%, 37%, 33%, and 29% for 16-, 24-, 40-, and 60-ton trucks, respectively. The findings confirm the established view in the literature that freight transport is a highly attractive area for DL vehicles because of the potential economic benefits.

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The benefit, in terms of social surplus, from introducing congestion charging schemes in urban networks are depending on the design of the charging scheme. The literature on optimal design of congestion pricing schemes is to a large extent based on static traffic assignment, which is known for its deficiency in correctly predict travel times in networks with severe congestion. Dynamic traffic assignment can better predict travel times in a road network, but are more computational expensive. Thus, previously developed methods for the static case cannot be applied straightforward. Surrogate-based optimization is commonly used for optimization problems with expensive-to-evaluate objective functions. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a surrogate-based optimization method, when the number of pricing schemes which we can afford to evaluate (due to the computational time) are limited to between 20 and 40. A static traffic assignment model of Stockholm is used for evaluating a large number of different configurations of the surrogate-based optimization method. Final evaluation is done with the dynamic traffic assignment tool VisumDUE, coupled with the demand model Regent, for a Stockholm network including 1 240 demand zones and 17 000 links. Our results show that the surrogate-based optimization method can indeed be used for designing a congestion charging scheme which return a high social surplus.

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