Citation

Ben-Akiva M, de Palma A, Kanaroglou P. Transp. Res. Rec. 1986; 1085: 16-26.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1986, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences USA, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The model of Ben-Akiva, Cyna, and de Palma is extended to represent trip departure time and route choice decisions when total demand is elastic. The simple case treated has two parallel routes with travelers jointly selecting route and departure time. The delays are assumed to occur at bottlenecks of limited capacity (bridge, tunnel, etc.) and a simple queueing model is employed to determine waiting time as a function of queue length at the time of arrival at the end of the queue. The day-to-day adjustment of the distribution of traffic is derived from a dynamic Markovian model. Numerical simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate some of the interdependencies that may exist among different bottlenecks in a road network. It is shown, in particular, that, in the presence of elastic demand, congestion may persist even when capacity of a bottleneck is expanded to meet the highest level of existing traffic flows. This does not mean, however, that expanding the capacity of a bottleneck and thus diverting trips from other routes cannot be a successful strategy for reducing schedule delays and traffic congestion along other routes, if that is the objective of traffic management. In addition, it is shown that if the capacities of the bottlenecks remain constant on average, but fluctuate from day to day because of stochastic factors (such as weather conditions), average traffic delays tend to increase. The modeling approach presented in this paper can also be used for policy analyses such as finding the optimal capacity expansion, the optimal coarse toll of time-dependent toll, the impact of information in situations of stochastic capacity, and the impact of changing the characteristics of an alternative travel mode.

Language: en

Keywords

URBAN PLANNING; PROBABILITY - Queueing Theory; STREET TRAFFIC CONTROL - Mathematical Models