The case study investigates the impacts of considered measures about access fee (road user charging regime) for cars towards the inner areas of Budapest. Budapest the capital city of Hungary – as focal point of all main radial national roads and international routes – is suffering from road traffic congestion especially the inner city where inside the M0 motorway ring 7 of the 9 Danube Bridges are concentrated.

The Budapest Transport System Development Plan with one of the main goal of improving liveability considers with priority the development of public and non-motorised transport and the reduction of the road traffic as important tools for it. On longer term the up-graded suburban rail lines should be more involved also in the local public transport and on shorter term the metro line M4 (under construction) should lighten the city from the in-bound traffic of the SW-corridor where the M1 (from Vienna) and M7 (from the Lake Balaton) motorways enter to Budapest. Among the planned accompanying measures an areal access fee should help to reduce the car traffic in the densely populated and also politically sensitive inner city areas (while the truck traffic is banned from the city since decades and recently are allowed in some other areas only by route permissions).

The investigation of the impacts of an area access fee on cars will be done by an integrated passenger model system which is able to react to measures and consider the interdependence between car and public transport. It has been calibrated on the base of household survey data for Budapest and the surrounding area. By the model for access fee the destinating non-residental car traffic is reduced by shifting trips to public transport and by redistribution of trips to other places outside the restrained area, further substantial part of the through-traffic is diverted to other routes, by-passing the given area. To the assignment program of PTV VISUM different impact modules are joined calculating among other indicators also the fuel consumption, the emitted air pollution and noise on the road sections in dependence by road traffic conditions (traffic volumes, speeds) for the entire year differentiated by characteristic hour-groups on the whole network.

These indicators (quantities, values) of the considered access fee schemes allow in comparison to the existing “without fee” case the calculation of an “impact balance” for different city areas and the revenues derived from the access fee paying in-bound traffic. It seems to be important to show the changes in modal-split and environmental indicators and damage values, which can be avoided by the access fee.