Taxis in road pricing zone: should they pay the congestion charge?

Abstract

SummaryThis study aims at investigating the impact and feasibility of charging taxis with toll fee in the pricing zone when designing congestion pricing scheme. A bi‐level programming model is developed to compare the maximum social welfares before and after the congestion charge is imposed on taxis. The lower level is a combined network equilibrium model formulated as a variational inequality program, which considers the logit‐based mode split, route choice, elastic demand, and vacant taxi distributions. The upper level is to maximize the social welfare when toll rates vary. The bi‐level problem can be solved by the genetic algorithm, whereas the lower level is solved by the block Gauss–Seidel decomposition approach together with the method of successive averages and diagonalization algorithm. An application with numerical examples is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm and to reveal some interesting findings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.