Investigating undesired spatial and temporal boundary effects of congestion charging

Ge, Ying-En; Stewart, Kathryn; Sun, B; Ban, XG; Zhang, S

Abstract

Two types of reported problems are related to the existing congestion charging projects that levy traffic only in a certain area within one or a few time periods during the day. One is that travellers depart earlier or later than a charging period to avoid paying full or part of the congestion charging tolls, which creates two undesired demand peaks that are often greater than available capacity. One peak comes just before the start of congestion charging and the other follows the end of it. We term this phenomenon ‘temporal boundary effect’ of congestion charging. The other reported problem is that travellers would rather stay away from a charging zone than pay congestion charging tolls, which causes undesired congestion on those roads or paths on the edge of the charging zone. We call this phenomenon ‘spatial boundary effect’ generated by congestion charging. This research investigates these boundary effects in the context of simultaneous route and departure time choice dynamic user equilibrium (SRD-DUE) network flows with an aim to gain new insights into congestion charging design. Numerical experiments investigating constant and time-varying congestion charging toll profiles are presented in this paper. This investigation shows that congestion charging may not be able to eliminate hypercongestion efficiently if schemes are not well designed, and can unfortunately give rise to undesired boundary effects and that a simply designed congestion charging scheme with small level toll or time-varying toll profiles can reduce the magnitude of boundary effects but may not be able to fully eliminate such undesired effects

Citation

Ge, Y.-E., Stewart, K., Sun, B., Ban, X., & Zhang, S. (2016). Investigating undesired spatial and temporal boundary effects of congestion charging. Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, 4(2), 135-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2014.961044

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 29, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Oct 10, 2014
• Publication Date: 2016
• Deposit Date: Feb 26, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 26, 2015
• Print ISSN: 2168-0566
• Electronic ISSN: 2168-0582
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 135-157
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2014.961044
• Keywords: traffic congestion pricing; boundary effects; dynamic user equilibrium
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/7644
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2014.961044