Congestion pricing as an urban energy strategy: a mixed-methods analysis of expert insights on regional implementation challenges and energy trade-offs

Congestion pricing (CP) is increasingly promoted as a demand-side instrument to manage urban congestion, reduce transport energy use, and advance climate goals. Yet adoption remains geographically uneven and politically contested, raising questions about how practitioners assess its feasibility and energy relevance. This study provides a cross-regional policy analysis of expert perspectives on CP as an energy and mobility strategy. Drawing on 107 qualitative responses from transportation and energy professionals in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Rest of the World (RoW), the study integrates deductive thematic coding, stance classification, network analysis, and sentiment scoring. Results show that inadequate transit alternatives were the most consistently cited barrier across all regions (35–36%), highlighting CP’s dependence on complementary infrastructure investment. Other barriers vary regionally: public acceptance is the most frequently mentioned barrier in North America (39%) and Europe (55%). Other prominent concerns include infrastructure gaps in North America (29%), political resistance in Europe (36%) and RoW (32%), and infrastructure gaps (29%) and economic conditions (26%) in the Middle East. Only 28% of the 100 respondents who provided substantive answers to Question 2 consider CP independently decisive for energy reduction, while 18% dismiss its significance entirely; the majority (54%) adopt conditional or nuanced positions, framing its impact as contingent on policy integration. Overall, CP is viewed less as a standalone decarbonization solution than as a context-dependent instrument whose effectiveness depends on institutional capacity, distributional design, and strategic policy bundling. These findings suggest that cities pursuing CP should prioritize transit investment and equity safeguards as enabling conditions that support politically viable, energy-efficient pricing reforms.