Understanding Changes in Travel Behavior due to Managed Lanes

Along with Rule of a Half (RoH), Log-sum (LS) is probably the most used welfare measure, to assess policy impact on consumer’s welfare. However, they both rely on the assumption of an absence of income effect, this is, fixed marginal utility of income, invariant along the population. Such a strong presumption facilitates calculations due to the correspondence between LS and Compensating Variation (CV), the exact measure to evaluate changes in consumer surplus. That approach has been usually grounded in two ideas: (1) that the household’s transportation expenditure is negligible and; (2) that changes in policies that affect that expenditure are also minor. The fact is that transportation expenditure may represent an important share of the total, especially in the case of low-earning households. Furthermore, aggressive pricing policies or a global rise in energy prices might decisively affect income in real terms. Hence, the calculation of benefit measures based on demand models that do not account for income effect may produce inaccurate results. Although some authors have explored the gap between CV and other benefit measures, very little research has been done with non-synthetic recent data, especially in the context of Managed Lanes. The practical importance of toll policies and the recurrent discussion about the improvement of social welfare by such strategies, make the matter at hand particularly relevant. However, there is an apparent absence of substantial welfare analysis supported by real data in the field. In order to shed light on the issue, the present study closely follows the work of Cherchi and Polak (2004) with the aim of testing whether or not LS and RoH are good approximations to the true CV under nonlinear effect in the marginal utility of income, but using real data instead of synthetic. This is the first contribution of this work, the use of information gathered through a dedicated Stated Preferences survey to evaluate the gap between true CV and both LS and RoH. The second is the inclusion of heterogeneity in Travel Time, one of the fundamental elements that impact travelers’ decisions. This effect of taste is considered through a Multinomial Mixed Logit (MML) model with random parameters, from which the measures will be computed and compare to the case of a Multinomial Logit (MNL).

• Record URL:
  • http://ntc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/documents/research/NTC2015-SU-R-09%20Cinzia%20Cirillo.pdf
• 
• Summary URL:
  • http://ntc.umd.edu/node/119
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This document was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
• Corporate Authors:

  National Transportation Center at Maryland

  1124 Glenn Martin Hall
  University of Maryland
  College Park, MD  United States  20742

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Vicente, Javier Bas
  • Cirillo, Cinzia
• Publication Date: 2017-11

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 22p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Income; Logits; Managed lanes; Methodology; Stated preferences; Surveys; Tolls; Travel behavior; Travel time; Welfare economics
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Society;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01666288
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: NTC2015-SU-R-09
• Files: UTC, TRIS, ATRI, USDOT
• Created Date: Apr 19 2018 9:48AM