Increasing Governmental Efficacy Beliefs Drives Support for Congestion Pricing Policy

Congestion pricing charges drivers a fee to enter high-traffic areas, reducing congestion and travel times while generating revenue for public transit and lowering air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Despite its effectiveness, the policy remains contentious because it imposes immediate, salient personal costs in exchange for benefits that are less tangible, delayed, and distributed across both individuals (e.g., shorter, more reliable trips) and society (e.g., cleaner air, safer streets, and improved public transit). This asymmetry between how costs and benefits are experienced poses a challenge to public support, which is essential for both the adoption and long-term durability of the policy. Across two large-scale experiments conducted in New York State (N = 15,014) and Washington, D.C. (N = 4,030), we tested 24 psychologically informed interventions designed to increase support for congestion pricing. Increasing governmental outcome efficacy beliefs, by emphasizing that the policy enables government to deliver meaningful public benefits, emerged as the most effective strategy, increasing support for congestion pricing by 30%, while also improving perceptions of the policy's effectiveness and fairness. These effects were robust across intervention delivery modes that varied in participant engagement and did not differ by political affiliation. Together, these findings identify policy-specific outcome efficacy as a scalable and politically robust communication strategy for building public support for sustainable transportation policies.