Welcome to CURACAO

Urban road user charging is at the same time uniquely capable of reducing the problems of urban travel, and uniquely difficult to implement. Those cities which have implemented urban road user charging have all achieved reductions in traffic entering the charging zone in the range of 14% to 23%. This represents a change in travel patterns which cannot be approached by any other available transport policy instrument. Yet over the last five years, in which schemes have been implemented successfully in Milan, Stockholm and Valetta, ten UK cities and two US cities have decided to abandon plans for charging, despite substantial government grants designed to encourage such schemes. In Edinburgh and Manchester these decisions were made in the public glare of referenda which rejected charging proposals by majorities of 70% to 80%. It is clear that there are serious barriers to the pursuit of urban road user charging, and that cities need guidance if they are to make better use of this potentially
powerful transport policy tool.

This shortfall, between the potential of urban road user charging and the progress of its actual implementation, has been the focus of a three year project funded by the European Commission: CURACAO - Coordination of Urban Road User Charging Organisational Issues. The aim of CURACAO has been to support the implementation of urban road user charging as a demand management tool in urban areas. The project did this by working with a user group of 20 cities interested in pursuing road user charging to identify the barriers to their doing so, and providing evidence on ways of overcoming those barriers. Evidence was provided both through a State of the Art Report, which reviewed international evidence on each of 14 themes of interest to the cities, and through a set of 16 case studies of successful implementations, current plans and abandoned proposals.

In addition to the State of the Art Report and the Case Study Report, results have been disseminated through a set of 30 fact sheets and a “guiding presentation” which presents the key messages in a flexible PowerPoint presentation. Drawing on these findings, a series of policy recommendations have been developed for cities, for national governments and for the European Commission. Throughout the project, user group cities have been directly involved in designing and commenting on the project’s outputs. Working closely with particular European cities in this way has established a positive cycle of knowledge growth and development amongst the decision makers and technical experts in these cities.