The Optimal Road Tolls and Parking Fees for Managing Daily Household Commute in a Linear City

Abstract

This paper exams a daily traffic pattern of household on a morning and evening commute link. It is assumed that the parking is located along commuting routes radiating from the CBD and the households have two preferred arrival times, i.e., school start time and work start time. Based on bottleneck model, the households’ departure time choice is assumed to follow the user equilibrium principle according to tip cost. The analytical solution of the proposed model is derived. We then design pricing schemes, i.e., a time-varying road toll and a location-dependent parking fee. Within the framework of the extended bottleneck model, we proved that the proposed joint scheme of road toll and parking fee can effectively eliminate the queues behind the bottleneck, even reduce the schedule delay by reversing the spatial order of parking. We also find that the location-dependent parking fee with no road toll could improve the morning commute pattern. Furthermore, the numerical results show that the proposed pricing schemes can indeed improve the efficiency of the household commute through decreasing the total travel cost.