Abstract
This article proposes a tradable credit scheme for managing commuters’ travel choices. The scheme considers bottleneck congestion and modal split in a competitive highway–transit network with heterogeneous commuters who are distinguished by their valuation of travel time. The scheme charges all auto travelers who pass the bottleneck during a peak-time window in the form of mobility credits. Those who avoid the peak-time window, by either traveling outside the peak-time window or switching to the transit mode, may be rewarded credits. An artificial market is created so that the travelers may trade these credits with each other. We formulate the credit price and the rewarded and charged credits under tradable credit scheme. Our analyses indicate that the optimal tradable credit scheme can achieve nearly 40% efficiency gains depending on the level of commuters’ heterogeneity. In addition, this scheme distributes the benefits among all the commuters directly through the credit trading. Our results suggest that in assessing the efficiency of tradable credit scheme, it is important to take into account the commuters’ heterogeneity. Numerical experiments are conducted to examine the sensitivity of tradable credit scheme designs to various system parameters.
Highlights
Congestion in morning commuter traffic has traditionally been modeled as a bottleneck problem
The economics of a morning commute problem on a single bottleneck is investigated for a heterogeneous commuter population and with a choice of auto and transit mode of travel
We proposed a tradable credit scheme (TCS) as an alternative demand management strategy to replace the step-coarse toll
Summary
Congestion in morning commuter traffic has traditionally been modeled as a bottleneck problem. The classic bottleneck model was developed by Vickrey[1] who studied the commuting congestion in a highway between a residential area and a workplace. It shows that there exists an equilibrium departure-time pattern, whereby all commuters incur the same travel cost no matter when they start their trips. The bottleneck model offers a flexible framework for investigating the effects of congestion pricing schemes to alleviate the queue behind the bottleneck.[2,3,4] In this context, congestion pricing is found to be efficient in internalizing the external costs of the traffic by inducing the change in departure pattern
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