Abstract
This study focuses on an environment-friendly toll design problem, where an acceptable road network performance is promised. First, a Traffic Performance Index (TPI)-based evaluation method is developed to help identify the optimal congestion level and the management target of a transportation system. Second, environment-oriented cordon- and link-based road toll design models are respectively proposed through the use of bi-level programming. Both upper-level submodel objectives are to minimize gross revenue (the total collected toll minus the emissions treatment cost) under different pricing strategies. Both lower-level submodels quantify the user equilibrium (UE) condition under elastic demand. Moreover, the TPI-related constraints for the management requirements of the network performance are incorporated into the bi-level programming modeling framework, which can lead to 0–1 mixed integer bi-level nonlinear programming for toll design problems. Accordingly, a genetic algorithm-based heuristic searching method is proposed for the two pricing models. The proposed cordon- and link-based pricing models were then applied to a real-world road network in Beijing, China. The effects of the toll schemes generated from the two models were compared in terms of emissions reduction and congestion mitigation. In this study, it was indicated that a higher total collected toll may lead to more emissions and related treatment costs. Tradeoffs existed between the toll scheme, emissions reduction, and congestion mitigation.
Highlights
The continued growth of motor vehicles associated with a large amount of exhaust emissions can lead to deteriorated ambient air quality, which is not ignored by urban authorities
The results showed that under the user equilibrium (UE) condition, the Congested Distance Proportion (CDP) value was 6.44%, which corresponded to the road network performance of level B
It was indicated that the optimal CDP value obtained from Model (6) corresponded to the performance level of A based on Table 1
Summary
The continued growth of motor vehicles associated with a large amount of exhaust emissions can lead to deteriorated ambient air quality, which is not ignored by urban authorities. In Beijing, China, motor vehicles were over 5.61 million, and the associated annual pollutant discharge was more than 700,000 tonnes, in 2016. It was estimated that the pollutants contributed by motor vehicles accounted for 86%, 56%, 32%, and 35.5% of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), hydrocarbons (HCs), and PM2.5 total emissions, respectively. It is necessary to deal with the pollution problems caused by the urban traffic system. Road pricing has been considered to be an effective measure for traffic demand management. It is essentially based on the principles of economics. For real-world pricing implementations, Singapore took the lead in implementing the first congestion pricing policy in the world in 1975, followed by other cities and areas such as London, Hong Kong, Oslo, Gothenburg, and Stockholm [9]
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