Traffic Management Modelling And Analysis Based On Tradable Credits Scheme

It is important to investigate travelers' possible reactions and travel choices when introducing a new traffic mobility management measure.Given a traffic management instrument,travelers' travel choices can be significantly affected by their attitudes towards this instrument and how they frame the loss and gain in this instrument.This is especially true when travelers' imperfect rational behaviors are considered.We study travelers' route choice behaviors under road toll and tradable credit scheme(TCS)based on the mental account theory.The potentials of the TCS in the private financing of public roads and in the management of bottleneck congestion during public holidays are also investigated.Main contributions of this thesis includes:1.A transport network equilibriuminvestigation based ontravel mental budgeting under road toll.Assuming that every traveler sets a mental account for his/her travel to keep track of their expense and keep out-of-pocket spending under control.Route tolls that exceed the budget are much more unacceptable compared to those within budget due to the non-fungibility of money between different accounts.With the approach of introducing the conceptions of mental account and mental budgeting into the process of travelers' route choice,we try to identify why the usages of tolled roads are often overestimated.It is found that the main reason that the usages of high tolled roads are often overestimated is due to the fact that travelers with low and moderate out-of-pocket travel budget perceive a much higher travel cost than their actual cost on the high tolled roads.2.TCS for mobility management considering travelers' loss aversion.Loss aversion is a basic preference property,which reflects the phenomenon that people treat losses and gains asymmetrically.Under a given tradable credit scheme,travelers' loss aversion behavior for credit charging during the route choice process is studied.A disutility function of loss aversion is applied to approach travelers' different attitudes towards credit loss and gain.The user equilibrium(UE)and market equilibrium(ME)conditions considering loss aversion effects are formulated into a variational inequality(VI)problem.Analyses demonstrate that the system optimum(SO)credit scheme does not always exist.A proposition is further presented to guarantee its existence.3.Traffic assignment under TCS:an investigation considering travelers' framing and labeling of credits.As the initial credits are distributed to travelers by the government for free,there is an unearned windfall,and credits are labeled as special allowance for travel.From the perspective of mental account,the framing of windfall and the labeling of income can dramatically influence people's decision making.We investigate the impact of travelers' framing and labeling of TCS on their route choice behavior.4.Investigation of the peak-hour traffic congestion during public holiday based on TCS.The traffic congestion during public holidays is very typical due to the mass departures of tourists.This is especially true for the beginning of the holidays.The situation is even worse under some government policies designed initially to benefit people,e.g.the highway toll exemption during public holidays in China.The focus of this paper is to model the evolution of traffic congestion caused by the demand from residential place to the famous resorts during public holidays.The research questions include:(1)how do tourists tradeoff between early departure,queuing time and the overcrowding of the resort?(2)the impact of the toll-exemption policy during public holidays on tourists' departure time choices and the social welfare;(3)the potential of the tradable credit scheme in managing the traffic congestion during public holidays.5.Private financing and mobility management of road network with TCS.We employ the tradable credits scheme on traffic mobility management and private provision of public transportation infrastructure through a novel kind of private financing of public road:build-equity-credit(BEC)scheme.The government can achieve its objectives(e.g.construction of the new road,desired traffic condition,certain vehicle emissions threshold)without its own capital,the private firm can receive its expected profit with less public's resistance and the travelers can enjoy less congested traffic with a negligible cost.A general bi-level programming problem is formulated to model the determination of capacity of the new road and the tradable credits scheme in BEC scheme.The properties of several different BEC scenarios are investigated.