Transportation demand management (TDM) and social justice: A case study of differential impacts of TDM strategies on various income groups

Abstract

The paper presents an evaluation of welfare gains and losses of individual commuters in response to various transportation demand management (TDM) strategies. A computationally tractable mode choice model for commuters is estimated using data collected in the Region of Peel, Ontario in 2014 through a joint revealed and stated preference survey. The survey intended to obtain information on the impacts of TDM strategies on commuting. The empirical investigation reveals that the impact of TDM strategies vary by different income groups. In particular, low-income households are the clear gainers when transit attributes such as fare and travel time are reduced, and vice versa. It is found that bike-related TDM strategies, such as showers, lockers, and bike accessible ramps, can certainly help encourage the use of bikes among commuters, but on their own, their impact will most likely be insufficient to convince commuters to change their commuting mode. However, bike share, car share, and emergency ride home programs at workplaces have higher compensating variation than the other TDM strategies. The likely cause of their higher impact could be due to the low entry investment required, in the case of the bike and car share programs, and the risk remediation provided, in the case of emergency ride programs. Though this microeconomic approach is explicitly aimed at the commuters of the Region of Peel, a similar approach can be taken elsewhere to measure the differential monetary benefit of TDM strategies on different income groups across the population.