During the last few decades, the European Union has promoted distance-based charges on heavy goods vehicles for the use of main roads as a means of funding the infrastructure and internalizing external costs. This approach has progressively been implemented by many European nations. From a macro perspective, this paper explores the impact of heavy vehicle tolling on road freight demand in the countries where it has been implemented. To that end, we develop a dynamic panel data methodology to analyze the evolution over time of road freight traffic and modal share for the European countries having implemented a nationwide per-km truck tolling policy. The results show that, with the exception of very specific cases, there is not strong evidence that heavy vehicle tolling had either influenced road freight volume or promoted the shift of freight to alternative modes. In addition, the limited effect of this charging policy has been partly or mostly counteracted by the evolution of other explanatory factors such as economic growth and the expansion of high capacity networks.

中文翻译：

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欧洲的重型车辆收费在减少公路货运和促进运输方式转变方面是否有效？

在过去的几十年中，欧盟一直在推动对使用主要道路的重型货车按距离收费，以此作为为基础设施提供资金和内部化外部成本的手段。许多欧洲国家已逐步实施这种方法。本文从宏观角度探讨重型车辆收费对实施国家公路货运需求的影响。为此，我们开发了一种动态面板数据方法，以分析实施全国每公里卡车收费政策的欧洲国家公路货运交通和运输方式份额随时间的演变。结果表明，除了非常特殊的情况，没有强有力的证据表明重型车辆通行费影响了公路货运量或促进了货运向替代模式的转变。此外，该收费政策的有限效果已部分或大部分被其他解释性因素的演变所抵消，例如经济增长和高容量网络的扩张。