The macroscopic methodologies for analyzing the impact of various congestion pricing strategies for urban freeway

Abstract

As development of ITS technologies, the electronic toll collection (ETC) allows to develop diverse strategies for value pricing such as ERP(Electronic Road Pricing), HOT(High-Occupancy/Toll Lane Facility) lane, and FAIR (FAst and Intertwined Regular) lane system. A few developed countries have been applied these toll collection methods on the freeway and stored quite amount of data needed for analyzing their impacts on highway system. However, many of developing countries have not yet been experienced so, they need a macroscopic model for decision in choosing toll collection strategy best for their transportation environment before implementing it. The purpose of this study is to propose macroscopic model to analyze the prospective effects of value pricing strategies, and to compare their results. Three charging methods, ERP, HOT lane, FAIR lane, are simulated by using the proposed model. The results show that there was a sizeable increase in freeway capacity and in average travel speed on the tolled express lanes. It is also found that ERP system is superior in overall revenue from charging toll compared to other methods.