Key Challenges in Estimating Impacts of Road Pricing with State-of-the-Practice Transportation Models

Interest in road pricing has increased in recent years, and many metropolitan areas are considering pricing schemes to develop transportation revenue, manage travel demand, increase transportation capacity, or offer a premium level of service. Express lanes in particular, such as High-Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lanes, are gaining popularity because they are thought not to create negative traffic diversion. But recent experience with road pricing has shown that drivers consider many factors when deciding whether, when, and how to use a priced facility. State-of-the-practice modeling techniques only consider travel time and travel cost, neglecting the added travel time reliability benefits associated with priced facilities. It is clear that there is a distribution of values of time and values of reliability across the traveling population, however, most models have difficulty representing these distributions. Further, conventional models are not able to look at the influence of pricing on travel time-of-day or trip chaining. Among others, these considerations create challenges for estimating the impacts and revenue derived from imposing innovative road charges. This paper raises several issues that should be resolved to improve transportation models’ capacity to analyze road pricing projects and policies. In addition to the multiple data problems that exist, there are factors, such as the value of reliability, which should be incorporated into the framework of models. This research identifies the gaps in state-of-the-practice road pricing modeling techniques, identifies one potential modeling enhancement, and could lead to the improvement of existing models or serve as a basis for the development of new models.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Ensor, Jeffrey Douglas
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2006-1-22 to 2006-1-26
• Date: 2006

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 85th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Costs; Economic impacts; Estimates; High occupancy toll lanes; Highway capacity; Human factors; Level of service; Metropolitan areas; Periods of the day; Reliability; Revenues; Road pricing; State of the practice; Travel demand management; Travel time; Trip chaining
• Uncontrolled Terms: Challenges; Modeling
• Subject Areas: Economics; Finance; Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01024664
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 06-1518
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: May 25 2006 7:57AM