Dynamic congestion pricing for multi-region networks: A traffic equilibria approach

Abstract

The growing number of people living in cities results in rising mobility demand, and as aconsequence, the limited capacity of traffic networks gets more stressed. Hence, congested network links are causing travel delays and negative impacts on the environment, postulating for a methodology to overcome this challenge. Considering the broad range of traffic management systems, congestion pricing is a very effective tool to tackle today’s cities traffic problems. Different strategies are available in literature or even applied in real-world that show a positive effect on the traffic situation. This paper proposes a framework design that allows the testing of pricing policies and to evaluate their performance in alleviating congestion. The study implements a multi-regionurban network, where the urban regions are considered as homogeneous and replicated with a representative Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD). To assess the impact that different pricing policies may have on traffic behavior, a route choice algorithm is utilized and a concept for the computation of the dynamic user equilibrium, as well as the system optimum, are proposed. A case study is presented, where the modeling approach is applied to the heterogeneous road traffic network of the city of Zurich, Switzerland.