Congestion Tolling for Mixed Urban Freight and Passenger Traffic

Chaoda Xie,Xifu Wang,M Figueira,G Lodewijks,J Rześny,R Montemanni

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201712402003

Abstract

This paper investigates the welfare effects of optimal tolling on urban traffic congestion, in a bottleneck model, with mixed freight and passenger users. The users’ marginal utility of time is considered to be varying with time. Under both no-toll equilibrium and socially optimal tolling, the users are found to sort their arrival time according to the increasing rates of marginal utility at the destination. The optimal toll that maximizes social welfare does not change each user's indirect utilit y relative to the no-toll equilibrium, but completely removes the queue, which also removes the barrier of freight carriers to accept congestion pricing by relating their marginal utilities directly to the toll. When the toll is equally rebated, the proposed social optimal tolling is a Pareto improvement relative to the no-toll equilibrium. Those more productive users also suffer more in both no-toll equilibrium and optimal tolling, which indicates that a differentiated redistribution of toll revenues could be an incentive to improve productivity.

Highlights

This paper focuses on the dynamics of traffic congestion induced by two distinct transportation demands, i.e. passengers and freights
This paper introduces the heterogeneity of preference to the time -varying marg inal ut ility scheduling model
The model is applied to treat the dynamics of urban traffic congestion incurred by both freight and passenger traffic

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses on the dynamics of traffic congestion induced by two distinct transportation demands, i.e. passengers and freights. The scheduling preference of freight and commuting users is defined by a marginal utility function with a contentiously distributed increasing rate This methodology is built in light of [16] that shows a way of analyzing the properties of congestion when the users’ travel distances to the urban bottleneck are continuously distributed. When the charge rate of delivery has to be set to the marginal cost under a complete co mpetit ive market, the receivers cannot get any price signal fro m the cordon toll to choose less congested delivery times [21] To cope with this fact, [22] proposes a time-distance pricing scheme to show an incentive of off-peak delivery to the carriers, wh ich, not applicable when receivers are densely concentrated in the city center. The proofs of propositions are all deferred to the Appendix B

A unified model

No-toll equilibrium

Optimal tolling

Numerical example

Findings

Conclusion