Schedule and Venue
12 December
Jogjakarta Plaza

Organizers
ADB, CAI-Asia, Embarq, ITDP, Environmental Defense, and Sida-SENSA

The majority of vehicles in Asia are now covered by vehicle emission and fuel quality standards, and in many cases firm plans have been formulated for tightening of these standards in the future. Yet rapid traffic growth counters much progress in curbing emissions. Advances in transport technologies must be complemented by the development and the adoption of policies to reform the transport sector and manage traffic growth for greater sustainability. Few countries and cities in Asia have comprehensive plans to manage traffic and improve public transport, walking, and cycling, which lie at the core of high performance sustainable urban transport.

While Singapore was the pioneer in introducing road pricing, this has not been actively followed up in other Asian Countries, perhaps because Singapore’s unique characteristics. However, more progress has recently been made elsewhere, specifically in UK, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and the US. The successful expansion of road pricing in these countries is generating new interest in many Asian cities where traffic problems abound.

Objectives
The objective of the event is to present decision and opinion makers with information to enable them to arrive at an informed decision on whether and how to apply road pricing in the medium term as part of an integrated strategy of sustainable transport linked to climate change mitigation and air quality improvement. This will be accomplished through:

• Review of experiences in Singapore, Europe, and the US with road pricing as part of an integrated transport strategy and a larger set of economic and other policy instruments to influence travel demand and foster use and improvement of public transport system and non motorized transport;
• Review of technological developments and their implications for the design and implementation and evaluation of road pricing schemes;
• Review of cost benefit analysis of road pricing schemes and their impact in relationship to other economic policy instruments, including assessment of implications on reduction of GHG and criteria pollutants, as well as other co-benefits such as reduction of productivity loses.
• Identification of supportive institutional and policy context for the introduction of road pricing;
• Review of political challenges to road pricing and ways to address these through system design, stakeholder consultation, performance-based contracting, and marketing.

Participants
25-30 regional participants with a mix of policy makers from the national and the local level, academics and other stakeholders which have a direct role in urban transport planning and management. In addition resource persons will be invited from Europe and Japan.

Contact Persons

Lee Schipper, Ph.D.
Research Director, Embarq, World Resources Institute
schipper@wri.org

Cornie Huizenga
Head of Secretariat, Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities
chuizenga@adb.org

Michael Replogle
Transportation Director, Environmental Defense
mreplogle@environmentaldefense.org