Impacts of Expressway Toll-Free Policy on Inter-City Travel Behavior During Chinese Spring Festival

Travelling during main national holidays is proved to be challenging. Since the significant increase in holiday travel demand, lacks of capacity and severe congestion have been observed all kinds of transport modes connecting mega cities. To accommodate the holiday travel demand, transport policies like toll-free expressway have been introduced to mitigate expressway congestion by increasing the capacity at toll stations and to reduce the load on the rail and air transport networks by encouraging public transport travellers to switch to private vehicle. More comprehensive understanding of factors influencing holiday travel C patterns is critical for designing effective policies to mitigate the holiday traffic congestion. This paper analysed inter-city journeys from Beijing to other provinces during the Chinese Spring Festival holiday 2017 and investigated the effectiveness of expressway toll-free policy on exodus travel behaviour using a stated choice experiment. Two Mixed Logit models were developed to investigate the policy’s influence on mode and departure date choice. The results indicate that the policy encourages travellers to change mode from public transport to private car. The effects differ between travellers using different public transport modes. Moreover, the effects of toll-free policy on mode change decrease with increasing travel distance. Furthermore, the policy would attract travellers to adjust their departure date to the toll-free period to avoid paying toll. The effect of the toll exemption differs for the different days around the holiday period. The propensity to change departure date also depends on travellers’ initial departure dates and initial stay durations at their destination.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE30 Standing Committee on Transportation Issues in Major Cities. Alternate title: Impacts of Expressway Toll-Free Policy on Intercity Travel Behavior During Chinese Spring Festival
• Authors:
  • Lin, Xiaomei
  • Susilo, Yusak O
  • Chunfu, Shao
  • Liu, Chengxi
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 9p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Expressways; Holidays; Intercity travel; Logits; Policy; Special events; Tolls; Traffic mitigation; Travel behavior
• Geographic Terms: China
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Policy;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01665992
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-04624
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Apr 12 2018 1:38PM