We construct a political economy model to analyze the political acceptability of road pricing policies.
We use a citizen-candidate framework with a population composed by three groups differing for their
income level. We show that road pricing policies are never applied when there is no redistribution of the
resources in favour of other modes of transport or when the congestion of these types of transport is
relatively high. The results suggest that the efficiency of the redistribution of resources from road to the
alternative types of transport as well as the fraction of the population that uses the road transport are key
factors in explaining the adoption of road pricing schemes.
