The increasing number of vehicles moving on the roads causes all over the world traffic problems, especially in the urban centres. The paper presents the main solutions to the urban traffic problem starting from the long experience of Turin in limited access areas and moving towards the recent experiences in pay-per-use schemes. Nevertheless the upcoming access control solutions do not take into account a set of critical factors, decisive for their sustainability. The “access rights” represent a more sustainable access control system and are able to ensure benefits in terms of both effectiveness and social acceptability of demand management solutions.