Evaluating Urban Transportation Equity And Corresponding Solution Study

Nowadays the transportation system in Chinese cities is facing very much challenge that include traffic congestion, emission pollutant, traffic accidents and other issues related to the mobility and accessibility. Those problems do mainly result from the contradiction of the increasing travel demand and limited road resource. Based on this widely acceptable conclusion, this paper focuses on the reasonable road resource allocation to alleviate the traffic congestion and try to find some ways to make better transportation policies. Doing so, this paper apply the completely new concept that is transportation equity to relief the traffic problems. The Chapter 2 starts with the discussion of equity, efficiency and equality, which three concepts with very close relationship, but those often result in confusion. After analyzing those three concepts, this part gives a clear meaning of the word of equity and presents the definition of transportation equity based on what equity means in transportation field. To make further analysis, this part tries to classify the transportation equity according to what aspect the transportation equity concerns. Furthermore the Chapter 2 starts evaluating transportation equity after representing the transportation equity evaluation indicators. Finally in Chapter 2, this paper recommends a framework for evaluating different type of transportation equity. Based on the evaluation framework, this paper put much concerns on the equity of transportation mode in Chapter 3. To compare two transportation modes and more than two will mainly reflect the horizontal transportation equity. This paper in Chapter 3 uses two indicators which are the passenger accessibility per kilometer road and external cost of transportation mode to evaluate the horizontal equity. This part also discusses the impact of two transportation modes on the disadvantage people, disadvantaged people on income and social class and disadvantaged people on mobility need and ability respectively. The most important thing in this chapter is to calculate the external congestion cost by establishing a new formulation with traffic flow theory and marginal cost concept. Finally in the chapter, this paper applies thenew formulation on the ring road 2 in Beijing to make a case study. The Chapter 4 will talk about the equity impact of transportation policy or transportation project. This part focuses on the comparison with transportation equity of the-state-of-art and that of transportation policy. This paper uses the Gini coefficient to quantify the transportation inequity. To evaluate the vertical equity with regard to income and social class and the vertical equity with regard to mobility need and ability, this paper represents a new set of evaluating framework to assess the transportation equity with Before-After method. After evaluating the equity impact of transportation policy or transportation project, this part analyzes the externality of transportation mode and use the Pigou tax theory to internalize the external cost. Finally as same as in the previous part, this paper uses the Beijing Ring Road 2 as a case study to internalize the external congestion cost and presents the result of road pricing by calculating the Pigou tax of congestion.