Abstract
Electronic toll collection (ETC) plays, as part of transport demand management (TDM) measures, an important role in preventing traffic congestion and improving the environmental conditions in urban and rural areas. An attempt is made in the framework of this paper to evaluate the overall performance of a toll station when a lane is dedicated to ETC. The case study refers to a toll station in the Thessaloniki Metropolitan Area, Greece. Scenarios considered specific traffic characteristics, variable toll booth setups, and different penetration rates of the ETC tag users for car and heavy vehicles. The tool used in the evaluation process was the PTV Vissim traffic simulation software. The operation of the toll station during a specific peak-hour period was simulated with the aid of the specific software. In total, 39 alternative scenarios were developed and compared to determine the level of penetration rate for which the ETC lane would be effective for different toll booth setups. Results showed that when the right lane of the toll station is converted to ETC lane, the penetration rate of this lane must be greater the 15% for the private vehicles and 20% for the heavy goods vehicles (HGV) to reduce traffic congestion and to improve environmental conditions. It was also found that when an additional ETC lane was introduced to the existing toll station set up, traffic congestion and the associated environmental conditions were much improved even for low penetration rates. It must be noticed that the results from the use of discounted cash flow methods like internal rate of return (IRR), net present value (NPV) and benefit–cost ratio (BCR) showed that all economic indicators converge as penetration rate increases in all toll booth setups. Therefore, there is a specific penetration rate threshold above which the economic viability of the investment is secured. These findings can assist the design of an effective policy in terms of the optimized operation of a toll station and sustainable mobility planning.
Highlights
Road pricing is a direct charge imposed on motorists for using a certain part of a highway or a certain area and include road tolls, distance based charges, congestion pricing, cordon pricing, charges for certain vehicle types, High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes etc. [1]
The purpose of the paper is to shed light on some of the vital questions that are related with highway management: what is the optimal penetration level of Electronic toll collection (ETC) tag users in which the whole investment has positive returns; how many conventional toll lanes should be converted to ETC lanes in order to achieve system optimization? The analysis presented in the paper can help policy makers, transportation planners, as well as transport infrastructure operators and future investors to better understand the impact that a transmission from conventional to ETC system will have
Based on the literature review presented above, the current study aims to provide an answer to the following main research question: what is the optimum ETC tag penetration rate combination for private and heavy goods vehicles (HGV) users, in order to have traffic, environmental, and financial gains?
Summary
Road pricing is a direct charge imposed on motorists for using a certain part of a highway or a certain area and include road tolls, distance based charges, congestion pricing, cordon (area) pricing, charges for certain vehicle types, High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes etc. [1]. When considering the best tolling technology to implement, many factors need to be considered. The implementation of electronic tolling has contributed to improving the traffic conditions on toll stations. The main systems of automatic vehicle identification rely on dedicated short-range communication technology (on one or multiple lanes), radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, barcodes, infrared technology, and automatic number-plate recognition [6]. There is an increase in payments conducted using smartphones or contactless cards. Such smart technologies are currently used or proposed in many countries for transportation ticketing [7,8]. The use of net present value (NFC) technology and smartphones in toll collection has been proposed in recent years but there is a need for further research before it is implemented [9,10]. Smart applications are proved to have multiple economic and ecological side effects in urban and rural areas [11,12,13,14], in road transport and in other modes of transport such as rail [15,16]
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