Urban Traffic Congestion: A Property Rights Based Research

With the increasing of Chinese cities' urbanization and the deepening of the reform, people's living standard improved, which resulted in the corresponding changes of their trip in the city. As the characteristic of these changes, motorized travel not only confines the development space of the city, but also makes people face more time delay, comfort losing and environmental deterioration in their daily commuting with the interaction of certain space layout of the city.Although local government takes measures as public transport priority, demand management and improving the urban traffic infrastructure etc., to ease urban traffic congestion, the situation is still getting worse. There are defects with these measures and the study researches made by scholars anyway. As the matter of fact, former study of the urban traffic congestion developed in two different directions, one is technological way, by using the tool of modeling, mathematical analysis and emulation. The other way is economical analysis based on theories of common goods and externalities. Although there are achievements in the study and the implementing of government policies, urban traffic congestion is more likely equilibrated, and there is no obvious trend which indicates that the urban traffic congestion will be eased in a short time.The dilemma as shown above is a result of the unilateralization of the researches and the policies in a certain extent. This respective rather than systemic way of dealing with the traffic jam limited both scholars and officials ability of touching the deep-seated nature of urban traffic congestion. To supply this gap, the author studied the mechanism of the corresponding individual's decision-making from the property rights point of view, and build up a utility-property rights model to explain how individuals make there decision in their daily commuting. Furthermore, urban traffic system was cataloged according to the property rights characteristics. As the consequence, corresponding subsystems were studied respectively considering the common rights, mixed property rights and club property rights. As the output of the theoretical research shown above, the author reveal the deep cause of the urban traffic congestion and put forward some suggestions to ease the congestion condition of China's city taking the example of Beijing.