Freeway congestion, ramp metering, and tolls

California freeway travelers suer large and variable congestion delay. The delay is due to operational ineciency, excess demand, and unforseen events. Operational ineciency reduces speed and may cause queue spillovers that reduce exiting flows. Excess demand creates delay on ramps. Unforseen events such as accidents temporarily reduce capacity. The Cell Transmission Model of a freeway with multiple origins and destinations exhibits the spatial propagation of congestion that conforms to observations. The model is used to compare four schemes to reduce congestion in a three-lane freeway: (R) ramp control only; (T) one lane is tolled and ramps are uncontrolled; (B) bottlenecks are tolled and ramps are uncontrolled; (RB) ramps are controlled and bottlenecks are tolled. In the base case no ramps are metered and there are no tolls. It is found that (T) is inecient and likely to leave all travelers worse o

[1]  A. Nagurney,et al.  A retrospective on Beckmann, McGuire and Winsten's "Studies in the Economics of Transportation" , 2005 .

[2]  Frank Kelly,et al.  Charging and rate control for elastic traffic , 1997, Eur. Trans. Telecommun..

[3]  Td Hau,et al.  CONGESTION CHARGING MECHANISMS FOR ROADS, PART I—CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK , 2006 .

[4]  Alexander Skabardonis,et al.  Congestion, excess demand, and effective capacity in California freeways , 2000 .

[5]  R. Horowitz,et al.  A localized switching ramp-metering controller with a queue length regulator for congested freeways , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005, American Control Conference, 2005..

[6]  Roberto Horowitz,et al.  Behavior of the cell transmission model and effectiveness of ramp metering , 2008 .

[7]  Jaimyoung Kwon,et al.  Effectiveness of California’s High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) system , 2007 .

[8]  Roberto Horowitz,et al.  Modeling, Estimation, and Control of Freeway Traffic , 2005 .

[9]  T. D. Hau.  ECONOMIC FUNDAMENTALS OF ROAD PRICING: A DIAGRAMMATIC ANALYSIS. POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER , 1992 .

[10]  T. Koopmans,et al.  Studies in the Economics of Transportation. , 1956 .

[11]  Markos Papageorgiou,et al.  ALINEA: A LOCAL FEEDBACK CONTROL LAW FOR ON-RAMP METERING , 1990 .

[12]  Alexander Skabardonis,et al.  Systematic Identification of Freeway Bottlenecks , 2004 .

[13]  K. Small,et al.  The Value of "Value Pricing" of Roads: Second-Best Pricing and Product Differentiation , 2001 .

[14]  Fernando Paganini,et al.  Congestion control for high performance, stability, and fairness in general networks , 2005, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[15]  Td Hau.  Economic fundamentals of road pricing . Parts I and II , 2005 .

[16]  Markos Papageorgiou,et al.  ALINEA Local Ramp Metering: Summary of Field Results , 1997 .

[17]  Kenneth A. Small,et al.  THE SCHEDULING OF CONSUMER ACTIVITIES: WORK TRIPS , 1982 .

[18]  I Yperman,et al.  Dynamic Congestion Pricing in a Network with Queue Spillover , 2005 .

[19]  C. B. Mcguire,et al.  Studies in the Economics of Transportation , 1958 .

[20]  Richard Arnott.  Properties of Dynamic Traffic Equilibrium Involving Bottlenecks , 1991 .

[21]  T. D. Hau.  ECONOMIC FUNDAMENTALS OF ROAD PRICING: A DIAGRAMMATIC ANALYSIS, PART I—FUNDAMENTALS , 2005 .

[22]  A. Palma,et al.  A STRUCTURAL MODEL OF PEAK-PERIOD CONGESTION: A TRAFFIC BOTTLENECK WITH ELASTIC DEMAND. IN: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN TRANSPORT ECONOMICS , 1993 .

[23]  Carlos F. Daganzo,et al.  Spillovers, Merging Traffic and the Morning Commute , 2007 .

[24]  W. Vickrey.  Congestion Theory and Transport Investment , 1969 .