IMPACT OF ROAD PRICING ON THE NETWORK RELIABILITY

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of road pricing on the transport network reliability is investigated with the use of a newly developed reliability-based user equilibrium (RUE) model. The RUE model can be adopted to overcome the difficulty in predicting the flow pattern in a congested and unreliable road network. In this RUE model, both the travel time and travel time reliability are taken into account for drivers' route choices by introducing a concept of path preference index (PI) to quantify the attractiveness of each alternative path for travel between a particular origin-destination pair. The PI is a weight sum of the path travel time index (TI) and the path travel time reliability index (RI), which represent the travel time and travel time reliability on a particular path respectively. The RUE model can be applied to investigate the effects of road pricing on travel time and reliability in urban road networks, in which drivers would consider both the travel time and its reliability for their route choices. In this paper, the RUE model is extended to maximize the network reliability by road pricing. The results demonstrated the trade-off between the total network travel time and the network travel time reliability. The effects of the toll on the total network travel time and the network travel time reliability are investigated.