Network Model for Rural Roadway Tolling with Pavement Deterioration and Repair

A rural pricing model which calculates diversion endogenously with a network assignment model is described in the article. Roadway tolling is often tied to revenue generation for roadway maintenance in rural areas and rural pricing models should directly incorporate a pavement deterioration and maintenance model. However, the interactions between these models are not simple, because tolls cause traffic diversion, which in turn affects deterioration rates and forecasted revenue. The pricing model presented in this article captures deterioration rates and pavement condition in the toll-setter's objective function, which maximizes long-run net present value of the highway infrastructure. A demonstration is made using a network that represents the state of Wyoming (28 zones, 60 nodes, and 188 links). A novel deterioration model is used which is particularly suitable for computational efficiency and the resulting model is discontinuous and nondifferentiable and involves solving a knapsack problem as a subproblem. Therefore, a simulated annealing-based algorithm is presented to solve it, in the framework of a new solution method built upon partitioning the feasible region. Sensitivity analyses reveal that although the locations for optimal tolling are relatively stable as demand changes, the revenue collected can substantially vary. Future research should investigate strategies for incorporating more advanced pavement network models. This paper used simple models for computational reasons.