Stef Proost

Road tolls, Diverted Traffic and Local Traffic Calming Measures: Who Should be in Charge?

In research conducted jointly with B. De Borger, Stef Proost has studied the traffic problems of a small town that is located parallel to a motorway and faces through traffic. They assume that the federal government can control traffic levels on the motorway using tolls, whereas a local government controls local accident risks and congestion using non-price measures such as speed bumps, traffic lights and explicit access restrictions for through traffic. The researchers conclude that the inefficiency of vertical competition between local and federal governments can largely be avoided by introducing a hierarchy of roads and having separate independent agencies negotiate over tolls and traffic calming measures.

Stef Proost is interested in public policy questions such as optimal pricing and investment in transport, the choice of policy instruments for environmental policy as well as in energy pricing questions. While visiting the ifo Institute he will work on decarbonisation of the transport sector and on transport policy questions. He is co-author of several models (TREMOVE, GEM-E3) to assess environmental policy in the transport sector and to assess economy-climate interactions in the EU economies.

Stef Proost is professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Leuven, teaching Transport and Environment courses. At present he is also associated with CREE (Oslo). Previously he held visiting professor positions in Sweden, France and the US. He is one of the founders of the Energy Institute of the KU Leuven and of the spin-off Transport Mobility Leuven (TML). Before joining the KU Leuven academic staff in 1989, he worked as researcher in electricity modelling and pricing at CORE, earned a PhD in Public Economics and worked as manager of an energy modelling team of the Belgian Government (Science Policy).