A Traffic Restriction Scheme for Enhancing Carpooling

Dong Ding,Bin Shuai

doi:10.1155/2017/9626938

Abstract

For the purpose of alleviating traffic congestion, this paper proposes a scheme to encourage travelers to carpool by traffic restriction. By a variational inequity we describe travelers’ mode (solo driving and carpooling) and route choice under user equilibrium principle in the context of fixed demand and detect the performance of a simple network with various restriction links, restriction proportions, and carpooling costs. Then the optimal traffic restriction scheme aiming at minimal total travel cost is designed through a bilevel program and applied to a Sioux Fall network example with genetic algorithm. According to various requirements, optimal restriction regions and proportions for restricted automobiles are captured. From the results it is found that traffic restriction scheme is possible to enhance carpooling and alleviate congestion. However, higher carpooling demand is not always helpful to the whole network. The topology of network, OD demand, and carpooling cost are included in the factors influencing the performance of the traffic system.

Highlights

Traffic congestion is becoming a world-wide problem
For the purpose of prompting carpooling, this paper proposes a scheme that using traffic restriction for solo driving travelers to encourage them to carpool
By a variational inequality we examine the impacts of this scheme on carpooling in a simple network with fixed restriction links and proportions; taking Sioux falls network as an example we design the optimal scheme to capture the optimal region and proportion under various scenarios

Summary

Introduction

Traffic congestion is becoming a world-wide problem. Several measures have emerged for alleviating traffic congestion, such as congestion pricing, signal control, and traffic restriction. Congestion pricing has been implemented in handful places such as Singapore, London, and Stockholm and received good performance as well as signal control and traffic restriction. Nie [13] indicated that traffic restriction scheme is a bad policy for social welfare, unless some complementary measures are taken, such as tradable credits scheme or control of vehicle quota as the travelers probably buy another vehicle with new road spacing qualification to avoid the regulation. Purchasing another vehicle normally happens in the places with low price of owing a vehicle.

Model Formulation

Impacts of Traffic Restriction Scheme

Optimal Traffic Restriction Design

Algorithm

Numerical Example

Conclusion