The Effect of Distance-Based Road Tolls on Freight Electrification : An electric vehicle routing optimization study of toll policy, fleet electrification, and total cost of ownership.

Sammanfattning

Distance-based road tolls are identified as an instrument for accelerating the shift from diesel trucks (ICETs) to battery-electric trucks (BETs), but the studies that assess them generally rely on static models that hold routing and fleet composition fixed. Such models treat electrification as a 1:1 replacement of ICETs with BETs and do not evaluate tolls within a real operational setting. This thesis evaluates distance-based tolls by embedding toll parameters inside an electric vehicle routing problem (EVRP) that optimizes fleet composition and routing together. Three operational cases drawn from Swedish freight networks were studied, covering Distribution, Middle-mile, and Long-haul transport, each under three toll settings, namely no toll, a charge on highways only, and a charge on all roads. Thousands of market scenarios were sampled to assess how toll design affects BET adoption, total cost of ownership (TCO), and routing. The effect distance-based tolls had on BET adoption depended on how competitive BETs were before any toll was applied. In the Distribution case, where BETs reached only a 22% vehicle share without tolls, a charge on all roads raised the share to 69%. In the Middle-mile and Long-haul cases BETs were already the majority choice without tolls, so the toll mainly reinforced an existing outcome. Tolls raised TCO for every fleet, but most for diesel fleets and increasingly so with haul length. Across all three outcomes, a charge applied to all roads was a more reliable instrument than a charge on highways alone, which diesel vehicles could avoid by re-routing onto toll-free roads. The results indicate that a distance-based toll is most effective where BETs are not already cost-competitive and where the charge cannot be avoided by re-routing. Because the cases assume a Swedish setting with high permitted vehicle weights and available charging, the findings are better read as indicating where electrification becomes likely under supportive conditions than as a forecast of outcomes across European freight in general.