Rational Behind the PATS Research

Urban transport has suffered profound changes in the last decades that affected its three main vectors: the political, the economic and the technological. In addition, over the last decades public transport has been used as a form of intervention to achieve equity objectives. Along the years it has been revealed that this represented a very inefficient way of intervention, once all users benefited from the same (subsidised) fares irrespective of their income levels.

The modification of the structure and dimension of the urban environment itself, the increased congestion, the scarcity of public money and the increased sensitivity of the society to environmental problems are among the most important factors that led to the development of schemes to promote the efficient use of transport.

Efficient pricing was discussed in the Green Paper "Towards fair and efficient pricing in transport", published in 1997. The crucial problem, which has often been observed and also debated is that efficient pricing principles may not be accepted or even understood by transport users and/or politicians. These debates also made clear that the term fairness can, and in fact is, interpreted in various ways.
The main questions addressed by the political discussion, concerning acceptability, seems to be:

• Additional source of state revenue or just remix  of revenues;
• Have to pay for what was previously free;
• What is the use being made of the money collected.