Research On Socio-Economic Impact Of Urban Traffic Congestion

Since the1980s, traffic congestion has become one of the main problems that the government of large-medium cities both at home and abroad faced, which also restricts economic development. On the one hand, people demand convenience and comfort of travel of higher quality with the development of the economy and society, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of private cars, the pressures of traffic demand increases continuously. Taking Beijing as an example, at the end of Aug.2012, the city’s motor vehicle population was more than510million, and the number of motor vehicle drivers was more than720million. On the other hand, road construction has a lots of limitation in investment and urban land due to the high demolition cost and the shortage of the available land area, resulting in the slow expansion of newly built and rebuilt of urban roads, the contradiction between transport supply and traffic demand become more and more obvious, traffic congestion is an important factor that obstructs the development of society and economy.In this dissertation, qualitative and quantitative methods are used to focus on analysis of the impact of traffic congestion on the socio-economic factors, such as population, employment, GDP, energy consumption, land use, environmental pollution, travel costs and travel time of residents, etc. By the integration of System Dynamics model and Cellular Automata model, the interaction SD model of urban traffic congestion and socio-economic and the micro-economic cost CA model of urban traffic congestion are developed from a macro social economy total quantity and micro resident trip perspective, according to advantages of the scenario simulation and macro-driven factors reflect of system dynamics model and advantage of the microcosmic traffic flow simulation of cellular automata models, which from the point of view of the total macro socio-economic and micro-resident travel. Starting from these two areas, it in-depth study of the impact of traffic congestion on the socio-economic and provide theory and policy support to alleviate urban traffic congestion.The main contents of this dissertation are as follows:First of all, it qualitatively analyzes the socio-economic attributes of urban traffic, defines the urban traffic congestion by traffic flow, travel, and economic. Then it introduces the main reason and characteristics for urban traffic congestion, and the method of computing urban traffic congestion index.it also defines influence channels and influence mode of the socio-economic impact of urban traffic congestion, and analyzes direct effect and indirect effect of the socio-economic impact of the urban traffic congestion;Secondly, it makes system analysis of urban transport and socio-economic (narrow sense) from a macro perspective to divide subsystems of urban transport and socio-economic interaction. Then it defines the boundaries and hypothesis of the system, the causal diagram and system flow diagrams are established. It designs parameters and structural equation by the sample of Beijing urban traffic data using the econometrics model. At last, it builds a SD model of urban traffic and socio-economic interaction, and takes model validation;Thirdly, taking Beijing as an example, it makes empirical analysis using the SD model of urban traffic and socio-economic interaction to study the social-economic impact of urban traffic congestion, such as the resident population, jobs, land area, energy consumption, environmental pollution levels and other variables from a macro perspective. At the same time, it analyzes the urban traffic congestion impact of the household registration policy, restricting the number of policies, the limit line of policy, lorry limit line of policy, infrastructure investment policy;Finally, based on microeconomics analysis of the urban road transport and urban traffic congestion, it designs cellular space, cellular neighbor, cellular rule and cellular state to build a micro-economic cost of urban traffic congestion model based cellular automat. The model is used to simulate the traffic flow changes of an assumed transportation network, as well as travel costs and travel time. At the same time, it can prior evaluate effectiveness of the social and economic policies to alleviate traffic congestion through the model simulation results, and then it determines which kind of policy is more appropriate.This dissertation aims to analyze socio-economic impact of urban traffic congestion from the macro and micro level, it clear the form and consequences of socio-economic impact of urban traffic congestion, So as to provide theory and policy support for reducing the negative impact of urban traffic congestion.