Many governments are being forced by budget constraints to consider implementing tolls as a means of bridge and road expenditure financing. It is possible to analyze the impacts of international business cycle fluctuations and toll variations on cross border bridge traffic between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez because of newly available time series data. A linear transfer function ARIMA methodology is used to carry out parameter estimation. Out-of-sample forecasting results are mixed, but price elasticities of demand are similar to those reported for other region economies.

The long-term efficiency of transport operator profit and the benefits for passengers conduce to opposite results. Actually, intervention by previous decision-makers to pursue one of the two goals generate opposite results on the other, forcing decision-makers to a difficult trade-off. The aim of this work is to provide a model that analyses, in an integrated perspective, operation and Service Policies (SPs), making an appropriate synthesis on both policies. This work proposes a cost-model formulation to optimize the merged operation and SPs to improve the current exploitation strategies according the service and maintenance activities. The proposed work is based on the following approaches : (i) a numerical model for the operation policy to determine the profit value of different working periods ; (ii) a stochastic process for the passenger flow that considers the uncertainty of passenger travel to compute the benefits according to their travel time ; and (iii) a cost-based optimization to bring together the operation and SPs. Finally, the proposed optimization model is applied to a massive urban ropeway operation of a public transportation system, in which the current SPs has been evaluated, considering the established transportation operation.