Do Older People Hold Different Attitudes towards Road Pricing Schemes Than Younger People Do?

In an ageing society, older people have a growing influence in politics in general, and potentially on the acceptability of road pricing in particular. Older people’s attitudes to road pricing are of particular interest because they face particular types of risk of social exclusion on transport grounds. Moreover, according to the literature, older people favour, more than any other age groups, what is positively valued for society – a process described as ‘pro-social value orientation’. Hence in a transport context, older people may be more likely to express positive or negative attitudes to the acceptability of road pricing depending on whether they believe it would be good or bad for others, or society in general. The people most important to them may also have a particular influence on older people’s evaluations about road pricing – an influence that is assumed to be the ‘social norms’ influence. The paper develops our theoretical and empirical understanding of these issues, based on the findings of a primarily quantitatively-assessed survey of 491 post-back responses combined with secondary data analysis, all of them implemented to identify age-specific attitudinal differences with respect to road pricing. On the whole, some support is found for the view that attitudes to road pricing do vary with age as pro-social value orientations, social norms and their influence on attitudes also do.