Modeling and evaluating FAIR highway performance and policy options (original) (raw)
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Transportation Development Research, 2023
This paper addresses the practically important challenge of devising efficient and politically feasible congestion pricing policies in the context of metropolitan highways. Congestion on metropolitan highways continues to grow while governments struggle to fund alternative modes of travel. The purpose of this paper is to explore the viability of a new approach to address highway congestion while also accommodating the mobility needs of those who don't drive. It involves creating congestion-priced lanes on limited access highways without adding new lanes. The lanes would be taken from general use and reserved for high-occupancy vehicles (HOV), transit vehicles and toll-payers, with cash rewards paid to HOV and transit users to attract solo drivers to shared travel. Variable tolls charged to loweroccupancy vehicles on the dedicated lanes would limit traffic demand on the lanes, keep traffic flowing, and fund the cash rewards. Rewards would be high enough to attract a sufficient number of drivers to ride as passengers instead so that congestion would be eliminated on the toll lanes and reduced on the remaining toll-free lanes through mode shifts. The policy-level analysis using a real-world case study of a radial highway segment with directional peaking suggests that this congestion pricing/cash rewards strategy could generate surplus revenues and provide financial support for bus rapid transit operating on the congestion-free lanes.
A Bi-Level Framework for Pricing of High-Occupancy Toll Lanes
TRANSPORT, 2014
As a freeway operational management strategy, High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes have been deployed to manage the demand for High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes by adjusting the tolls. By doing so, the capacity of freeways with such lanes can be used more efficiently. Periodically, setting the right amount of toll in accordance with the time-varying demand is a key to successful operation of HOT lanes; however, this is often difficult because travellers have heterogeneous willingness to pay for the toll and traffic conditions vary as the demand changes due to the imposition of tolls. This paper proposed an algorithm to determine the optimal level of toll for minimizing the total delay collectively spent by both HOVs and low-occupancy vehicles. Based on real-world traffic and survey data obtained from Gyungbu expressway in South Korea, a case study is presented to verify the applicability of the developed algorithm. The results from the case study show that the proactive dynamic pricing ...
Modelling the impact of alternative pricing policies on an urban multimodal traffic corridor
Transport Policy, 2011
This paper investigates the effects of alternative or joint schemes of road pricing and parking pricing to verify if private behaviour in operating parking facilities, road tolling and transit systems can lead to profitable results in the private sector and for public welfare. The evaluation is carried out using an idealised urban multimodal traffic corridor with some numerical examples that show the effects of different pricing policies. A Deterministic User Equilibrium assignment procedure is used to calculate certain performance indicators such as user travel costs, social costs and private profit. The results show that the system is highly sensitive to pricing policy and that a proper joint pricing of park-and-ride facilities, city centre parking and road tolls can be developed to simultaneously attain good private and social benefits.
Transport Policy, 2011
We analyze urban congestion management policies through numerical analysis of a simple model that: allows users to choose between car, bus or an outside option (biking); consider congestion interactions between cars and buses; and allow for optimization of frequency, vehicle size, spacing between stops and percentage of capacity to be dedicated to bus lanes. We compare resulting service levels, social welfare and consumer surplus for a number of different policies and find that (i) dedicated bus lanes is a better stand-alone policy than transit subsidization or congestion pricing. The latter is marginally better than subsidization but has a negative impact in consumer surplus. (ii) efficient transit subsidies are quite large since in many cases first-best transit price is negative; establishing dedicated bus lanes or implementing congestion pricing render subsidies unnecessary for high demand levels. (iii) both subsidization and dedicated bus lanes would count with public support while congestion pricing would probably encounter strong opposition. (iv) transit subsidies and/or congestion pricing do not induce large changes on optimal bus size, frequency, circulation speeds and spacing between stops in mixed-traffic conditions: dedicated bus lanes do. (v) In all cases analyzed, revenues from congestion pricing are enough to cover transit subsidies; the optimal percentage of capacity that should be devoted for bus traffic is around one third.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
In order to promote public understanding of the impact of regulations on consumers, business, and government, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution established the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. The Joint Center's primary purpose is to hold lawmakers and regulators more accountable by providing thoughtful, objective analysis of relevant laws and regulations. Over the past three decades, AEI and Brookings have generated an impressive body of research on regulation. The Joint Center builds on this solid foundation, evaluating the economic impact of laws and regulations and offering constructive suggestions for reforms to enhance productivity and welfare. The views expressed in Joint Center publications are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Joint Center.
Joint pricing and design of urban highways with spatial and user group heterogeneity
NETNOMICS: Economic Research and Electronic Networking, 2009
This paper addresses the joint optimization of capacity investments and toll charges imposed on multi-group users in monopolistic private highways within general road networks. A game-theoretic formulation is provided that leads to a nonconvex bilevel program. The proposed modeling framework handles several complex issues raised in realistic applications, such as regulations on the levels of tolls and service, and the discrete nature of highway capacity, using a genetic optimization technique. Real-application results show the importance of considering the spatial heterogeneity of prices, and the tradeoff between investments and pricing strategies in regulated private highways.
Trade-Off for Road Pricing Between Transportation Performance and Financial Feasibility
Transportation Research Record, 2005
This study estimates the transportation performance and financial impacts of express toll (ET) lane and high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane concepts, with and without new bus rapid transit (BRT) service. Estimates are made for a prototypical suburban transportation corridor in a major metropolitan area with the use of the Spreadsheet Model for Induced Travel Estimation, Managed Lanes (SMITE-ML), which was enhanced to analyze the conventional build concept with no priced lanes. The analysis demonstrates that in a typical case a HOT alternative may mitigate congestion more cost-effectively than an ET alternative. Combining BRT with ET may make this alternative much more effective, perhaps more effective than a HOT alternative with no BRT. BRT increases the benefits and economic efficiency of both ET and HOT alternatives, but it reduces financial feasibility because of the need for public tax support for transit. ET alternatives tend to be more financially feasible than HOT alternatives primarily because of the additional revenues generated from tolls; under this alternative, HOVs are not exempt from tolls. These conclusions hold up for the case study corridor even under extreme assumptions with regard to demand elasticity and value of time.
Carpooling and congestion pricing: HOV and HOT lanes
Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2010
It is often argued in the US that HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes are wasteful and should be converted to HOT (high occupancy vehicles and toll lanes). In this paper, we construct a simple model of commuters using a highway with multiple lanes, in which commuters are heterogenous in their carpool organization costs. We first look at the HOV lanes and investigate under what conditions introducing HOV lanes is socially beneficial. Then we examine whether converting HOV lanes to HOT lanes improve the efficiency of road use. It is shown that the result really depends on functional form and parameter values. In some cases, converting HOV lanes to HOT lanes reduces every commuter's utility. We further discuss the effect of alternative policies: simple congestion pricing without lane division; congestion pricing with HOV lanes. The analysis using specific functional form is presented to explicitly obtain the conditions determining the rankings of HOV, HOT, and other policies based on aggregate social cost. * Special thanks are due to Robin Linsey for his helpful comments and encouragement. We are also grateful to the conference/seminar participants at PET 2008 in Seoul, Kyoto University, and University of Tokyo for their comments.
Commuter welfare approach to high occupancy vehicle lane evaluation: An exploratory analysis
Transportation Research Part A: General, 1990
Exclusive high occupancy vehicle lanes, which have become a popular method of addressing the problem of urban traffic congestion, are often justified on the basis of inappropriate measures of effectiveness, and limited analyses. This paper demonstrates a theoretically consistent and defensible approach of high occupancy vehicle lane evaluation based on consumer welfare theory. The potential suitability of this welfare approach is illustrated in the context of a dynamic traffic equilibrium model.