Research Of Urban Road Congestion Charge Pricing

With rapid development of the economy, the traffic demand of the city increases day by day. But at the same time this also initiates many problems such as the more crowded urban road, excessive consumption of the energy sources, more and more traffic accident as well as serious environmental pollution and so on. Purely increasing transportation supplies can't fundamentally resolve the unbalance between traffic supply and demand, but induce the new traffic demand. Therefore, how to solve traffic problems such as urban traffic congestion is still need carry on the Traffic Demand Management (TDM). Congestion charge as a TDM strategy has received attention from more and more experts and policy-makers.Congestion pricing is to charge the vehicles for pass the specific road section at special time interval, in order to disperse the traffic volume from time and space, reduces the traffic load at rush hour and the crowded road. Meanwhile it will shift the traffic volume from private cars to the public traffic system, restrain the increasing private traffic, promote the car used more effectively, advance the implementation of car pool, improve the rate of the road utilizing, alleviate the traffic congestion ultimately. This measure may suppress the travel demand from the source of traffic demand, causes the travelers to reduce their journey or change the time, the way or the route of the journey, then reduce traffic jam.In the theory system of congestion pricing, the most important part is qualitative and quantitative analysis of external cost about traffic congestion, as well as establishing accurate pricing model. It is also the foundation of TDM policy. Therefore, this paper develops the research based congestion pricing model on external cost, and obtains a some results in a certain extent.First of all, the paper elaborates the questions about the city traffic congestion. Though analyzing the economical attribute of urban road, the paper interprets the reason why road congestion happens. There are two typical theories about congestion pricing in the past study. One is static congestion pricing, the other one is dynamic congestion pricing. Both theories are analyzed qualitatively and deduced quantitatively in the paper. There are four kinds of manifestations of external costs aroused by congestion. They are additional travel time, traffic accident, fuel consumption and environmental pollution. The paper carries on the quantification to these four external costs using the appropriate method separately. When quantifying the external cost of extra travel time, it adopts the travel cost law on the basis of local average unit time value. It calculates the cost of additional traffic accident based on probability that the traffic accident occurs when congesting in terms of the cost which producing in the actual accident. The external cost of extra fuel consumption is also quantified according to the vehicle consuming actually. When calculating the cost of environmental pollution caused by traffic, it takes the cost which to prevent pollution into account, puts the proportion of this pollution to the total pollution as a foundation. After analyzing the factors that influence congestion pricing, the paper establishes congestion pricing model based on external cost. Since the pricing model has been established, the paper computes the charge price according to the corresponding data of Wuhan in 2008.