The Assessment of the Change in the Share of Public Transportation by Applying Demand Management Policies: Evidence from Extending Traffic Restriction to the Air Pollution Control Area in Tehran

Abstract

The growing car ownership has caused a lot of problems such as increased travel time and environmental pollution. In recent years, different policies have been proposed for travel demand management. Among these plans conducted in Tehran, the Odd-Even day plan starting from the door of each house or the extension of traffic congestion zone to the Odd-Even plan zone can be mentioned. In the present study, to determine the change in the behavior of the people traveling in the air pollution control area in Tehran in return for the payment of a various toll and exploring their pro-environmental beliefs and attitudes which supports the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory, a stated preference questionnaire has been designed, and 500 of it were distributed among the individuals in this area and then collected. The results show that 51% of people have used their private cars to travel within the area. 24% of people have used semipublic transportation, and 25% have used public transportation (bus and subway) for their traveling. Based on the tolling design scenario, which was with an increase of 15 to 18% of the base traffic congestion zone prices of 2016, the relative frequency of using four types of non-public transportation (which is the sum of private vehicles and semipublic transportation) decreased 20 and 21% for different types of tolls throughout the day.