Managing day-to-day traffic mobility and emission of bi-modal road network with period-to-period pricing and subsidy scheme

Abstract

This study develops a mathematical optimization approach to manage the traffic mobility and carbon emission of a multimodal road network through period-to-period combined traffic pricing and subsidy scheme. The current approach considers interaction between traffic modes and explicitly formulates it into a general day-to-day traffic dynamics model, making it apply to a more general road network. In addition, the established optimization model takes both efficiency and environment into account the model objective, and allows for more practical and flexible settings on problem constraints or objectives. A constrained compass search algorithm is applied to solve the model with poor properties. In the end, numerical experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology. It is found that the constrained compass search algorithm shows desirable effectiveness and robustness, and the combined pricing and subsidy strategy is much more effective than a single strategy in improving the network mobility and reducing emission. We also find that the effectiveness of ticket discount is much lower than that of increasing frequency under a wide range of passengers’ value of time. This implies that a superior way of leveraging the money obtained from traffic congestion pricing would be subsiding the bus system for raising its departure frequency.