Equilibrium Analysis Of Commuting Pattern In Rush Hour Based On Activity Approach

Traffic congestion has always been one of the key issues affecting social development,economic improvement and residents’ happiness,moreover,traffic congestion often occurs at the bottleneck of roads,especially in the commuter corridor during the morning rush hour.It is of great significance to study the travel rules at the bottleneck of the road for easing traffic congestion.From the perspective of traffic demand management,this paper studies the departure time choices of commuters based on activity-based approach in the morning rush hour,and discusses the impact of the tradable credit scheme policy on commuters’travel behavior,so as to provide a theoretical basis for easing traffic congestion.The main contents of the paper are summarized as follows:Firstly,based on the classical bottleneck model,this paper adopts activity-based approach to analyze the travel behavior of commuters who passing through the bottleneck road in the morning rush hour.According to user equilibrium condition,i.e.,all commuters have the same travel utility,the equilibrium departure rate and critical departure time can be analytically derived.When the marginal utilities of activity are set to be zero,the equilibrium solutions in activity-based bottleneck model equal to those under the traditional trip-based bottleneck model.This implies that the trip-based bottleneck model is a special case of the proposed activity-based bottleneck model.In addition,numerical examples show that,to some extent,the activity-based bottleneck model is more general,and the classical trip-based bottleneck model is biased in terms of the evaluation of commuters’travel behaviors and bottleneck congestion.Secondly,this paper studies the departure time choices of heterogeneous commuters by activity-based approach.Heterogeneity mainly includes two aspects:the first is the heterogeneity with respect to the value of time,the second is the heterogeneity regarding the different travel ways,i.e.,conventional vehicles and autonomous vehicles.For commuters with heterogeneous value of time,commuters will follow the departure sequence of "commuters with high value of time-commuters with low value of time-commuters with high value of time" departing from home.For commuters traveling by autonomous vehicles,due to queuing time at the bottleneck can be used to perform other activities except driving the car,in order to reach equilibrium(i.e.,all commuters have the same the total utility),these commuters will choose to depart earlier with less queuing cost and higher schedule delay cost,whereas commuters traveling by conventional vehicles will depart later with high queuing cost and less schedule delay cost.Finally,this paper introduces tradable credit scheme as the traffic demand management policy to regulate the departure time of commuters and eliminate the queue at the bottleneck by charging credits.This study shows that under the optimal tradable credit scheme,commuters will depart at the departure rate which equals to the capacity of bottleneck,and will not face the queue.The numerical example is used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of tradable credit scheme in alleviating bottleneck queuing.