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Social impacts of road projects and road pricing effects, key findings

Over the 2008 - 2011 period, the PIARC Technical Committee A.3 on Road System Economics & Social Development focused its work on two main issues:

- approaches to assessing social impacts related to road projects,
- an analysis on the effects of road pricing schemes.

Contribution to the work came from all continents, as examples of ex-ante and of ex-post evaluations were made available from countries such as New Zealand, France, Japan, USA, Austria, UK, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.

Recent pricing initiatives were also reviewed, resulting in an extensive report featuring road pricing schemes descriptions from over20 countries as well as evaluations of their impacts from many of these countries.

This article provides an overview of the main findings.