An axiomatic characterization of fairness in transport networks: Application to road pricing and spatial equity

This paper considers the important issue of fairness in transportation. Designing fair policies in transportation is critical since transport networks are generally recognized as public goods. Moreover, the effects of road pricing may be significantly different for travellers from different geographical regions. Hence, any revenue collected from road pricing or infrastructure funding policies ought to be appropriately redistributed among the population of different geographical regions. In this work, the authors focus on spatial equity in the road pricing revenue assignment problem. They examine well-known fairness schemes commonly discussed in the literature: opportunity fairness, proportional fairness (individual value and marginal value), and market fairness. The authors conduct an axiomatic characterization of these schemes to demonstrate their properties and highlight their policy implications. They then present a practical implementation of the proposed fair pricing revenue assignment mechanisms on Winnipeg's downtown network. The results reveal that market fairness is the most axiomatically restrictive scheme and that this scheme is related to individual value and proportional value proportional fairness under specific conditions. The authors also demonstrate a paradoxical situation where a market or marginal value proportional fair assignment requires a certain group to pay taxes, because they receive more benefits than other groups. In turn, opportunity fairness is shown to be the least restrictive revenue assignment scheme and to require minimal computational resources.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2018.05.003
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X17304559
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/29485010
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Li, Xun
  • Rey, David
  • Dixit, Vinayak V
• Publication Date: 2018-9-30

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 142-157
• Serial:
  • Transport Policy
  • Volume: 68
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0967-070X
  • Serial URL: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/096707X

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Equity; Networks; Revenues; Road pricing; Transportation policy
• Uncontrolled Terms: Fairness
• Geographic Terms: Winnipeg (Canada)
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Policy;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01673048
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jun 22 2018 4:42PM