Development of a novel pricing mechanism for road closures based on accessibility losses

Road or lane closures due to maintenance or construction sites are annoying to mobile people. These inconveniences are externalities and so-called “social costs” and they impact, e.g., traffic and economic activities. To reduce these social costs, economists suggest using instruments for internalizing these costs. First schemes emerged that aim to incentivize the closure's causer to reduce the disruption to a minimum, e.g., “London's Lane Rental Scheme”. However, given the complex interactions in large networks with several parallel closures, the challenge becomes to identify the social costs and then attribute them to specific sites. In this paper, we propose to use accessibility to estimate the social costs of closures. Accessibility establishes a link between traffic in networks and land use. It provides a relationship with the economic performance of regions: a closure reduces accessibility across the network, which allows estimating economic losses. We illustrate the mechanism for Munich. We find that on a daily basis, the economic losses are about a hundred euros for closing a single lane of a collector road to a couple of thousand euros for closing an arterial. Assuming cost-based pricing, these social costs can serve as a pricing estimate for the party causing the closure.