A Systematic Review of the Role of Road Network Pricing in Shaping Sustainable Cities: Lessons Learned and Opportunities for a Post-Pandemic World
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The purpose of pricing is to find a better equilibration point between the demand of people and goods shipment and multimodal transportation capacity provision, assed from various transportation development and management goals, including facility preservation, facility life-cycle agency costs, vehicle/user/non-user life-cycle costs, mobility, safety, environmental impacts, and economic development supported by the transportation system. Essentially, pricing could target one or all transportation goals of facility preservation, system usage, and economy dimensions. In this respect, the paper needs work to categorize the references accordingly.
To improve transportation system performance, measures could come from (people/goods) travel demand management, multimodal integrated transportation capacity expansion, and efficient capacity utilization. Therefore, tieing in pricing only with TDM is biased. Particular to the TDM context, an individual trip, such as a person-trip is actually characterized by a sequential process of choices from destination location, arrival time, travel mode, departure time, routing, and facility use. We essentially strive for correlating attributes of each choice step with pricing. Prior to doing that, land use impacts must be thoroughly considered.
Once this part of TDM is sorted out, we need to holistically consider the interactions with transportation capacity provision. To this end, the paper needs a substantial amount of work before being accepted for publication.
Lastly, it appears that the authors maintain limited knowledge of transportation asset management that brings all these pieces together. Extensive literature exists in performance-based analysis, forecasts, needs assessment, transportation funding (actual funding available) and financing (innovative ways to maximize the budget over the available funding), budget allocation. Digging out pertinent references from Ph.D. dissertations, software, and graduate-level textbooks would definitely help with the manuscript refinement.
Author Response
Please see attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
I am pleased to read your article.
The conducted research is interesting and valuable for other authors. Congratulations.
I can bring to your article only small remarks:
1) in the ABSTRACT it would be good to include the main purpose of the article.
2) in lines 142-144 you have written:
"Paper must be published between 2007-2020. Even though road pricing first appeared in Singapore in the 1970s (Hensher and Li, 2013), the recent major contributions in the scientific literature started around the year 2007".
Try to explain in the text why 2007 is such a breakthrough; it is no clearly defined.
3) Conclussion - try to highlight the main results - e.g. bulleted results.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Solutions to sustainable cities are three-fold: Demand management, multimodal integrated flexible transportation capacity, and efficient capacity utilization using new tech and pricing schemes. Pricing is important, but along could not achieve urban sustainability. Strongly suggest the authors read the new book "Megacity mobility: Integrated urban transportation development and management".
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for their additional comments and suggestions. The authors agree and have included in the document that pricing should be considered as part of a holistic approach or range of solutions to urban transport sustainability. Indeed, on its own it is not a complete solution and should be accompanied by other measures. We are in full agreement. We also appreciate the reference to the new book and we look forward to getting a copy and reading it.
