In this seminar, we investigate which variables affect people’s reaction to urban pricing schemes in Spain. Most of works in this topic discover that the essential causes are not socioeconomic variables but the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of respondents. In order to measure these concepts, a Likert scale questionnaire was undertaken in a survey of 83 individuals grouping 19 items into seven categories: sensitivity towards environmental problems; responsibility; style of life favourable to cars; perception of transport problems; sensation of freedom restriction; inequality and personal gains, reserving an item, as a dependent variable, for acceptance. This questionnaire, along with the qualitative analysis from a previous focus group, shows the important differences between drivers and non drivers and the general strong public rejection. This belief comes along with the perception of the effectiveness of such a measure.

Among the explanation factors two ideas emerge: individuals are concerned about distributional aspects of pricing, not only in terms of income but in terms of use of space (it is considered a privilege for city centre’s residents); secondly, and most important, there is a strong fear of lack of transparency in managing revenues (i.e. corruption) or mismanagement of the whole system.

The methodology uses qualitative analysis from focus group and employs frequencies of opinions previously categorized into different groups- as an input for a regression model that was run using path analysis.

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