Abstract
As the traffic infrastructure for collecting vehicle tolls, the capacity of the toll plaza determines the service level of the entire highway. The capacity of a toll plaza is highly correlated with its operating costs, especially in peak periods. In this paper, it is assumed that in a competitive transportation system, the residential area and the workplace are connected by a highway with a toll plaza which forms a bottleneck, parallel to a mass transit line; commuters can choose to travel by car or by public transport. By establishing an equilibrium model and two mathematical programming models, the capacity designs of the toll plaza were studied during the traffic service period to achieve three objectives, namely, the toll plaza breaking even, profit maximization, and total social cost minimization of the transportation system. The travel modal splits were analyzed under travel equilibrium in three situations, respectively. In addition, a bi-objective optimization model was developed to optimize total profit and total social cost, and a Pareto optimization scheme was analyzed. Finally, the theoretical analyses were also verified by numerical examples.
Highlights
In recent decades, with the acceleration of economic growth and urbanization, rapid expansions and complex changes in developing cities around the world have emerged
The capacity of toll plaza seriously affects the fluency of highway traffic flow, which is determined by the capacity of toll plazas and the time of service delivery, all being related to operating costs
The revenue of toll plazas is a major source of funding for the repayment of highway construction loans and routine maintenance, renovation, and expansion
Summary
With the acceleration of economic growth and urbanization, rapid expansions and complex changes in developing cities around the world have emerged. Due to land resources and financial constraints, it is unrealistic to enhance traffic capacity at a large scale; the increasing traffic demand makes the congestion at the toll plaza increasingly serious For this purpose, transport departments often build mass transit systems (for example, a railway) to provide passengers with an alternative mode of transport. As labor costs continue to rise, the cost of operating toll plazas increases, making it necessary for operators to reduce operating costs to avoid losses This is the motivation for this paper to investigate several strategies with consideration of the operating costs of toll plazas in a competitive transportation system with highways and mass transit systems.
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