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In this paper, we study a routing and travel-mode choice problem for mobility systems with a multimodal transportation network as a “mobility game” with coupled action sets. We formulate an atomic routing game to focus on the travelers’ preferences and study the impact on the efficiency of the travelers’ behavioral decision-making under rationality and prospect theory. To control the innate inefficiencies, we introduce a mobility “pricing mechanism,” in which we model traffic congestion using linear cost functions while also considering the waiting times at different transport hubs. We show that the travelers’ selfish actions lead to a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We then perform a Price of Anarchy and Price of Stability analysis to establish that the mobility system’s inefficiencies remain relatively low and the social welfare at a NE remains close to the social optimum as the number of travelers increases. We deviate from the standard game-theoretic analysis of decision-making by extending our mobility game to capture the subjective behavior of travelers using prospect theory. Finally, we provide a detailed discussion of implementing our proposed mobility game.
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Equity Impacts of the London Congestion Charging Scheme: An Empirical Evaluation Using Synthetic Control Methods
Congestion pricing has been long-believed to effectively regulate traffic in urban city centers. Practical implementations of such policies have been hindered by concerns that they would disproportionately and adversely affect low-income groups. This paper analyzes the impacts of two price increases to the congestion charge on different income groups in Central London, making use of the synthetic control method to leverage empirical data from the UK National Travel Survey. We estimate that the highest income earners contributed to more of the revenue than the lowest income earners, making the scheme progressive in the scale of its equity impact. Although high-income travelers appeared to drop more charge-eligible trips as the price increased, their total trips to Central London did not decrease, suggesting that they were able to substitute with non-chargeable modes of travel. Low-income travelers saw large declines across both chargeable and non-chargeable modes, revealing a much lower rate of substitution. The low-income group responded more to the 2011 price increase than the 2014 one, demonstrating the diminishing ability of subsequent price increases to regulate demand.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739505
- PAR ID:
- 10428606
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
- Volume:
- 2677
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0361-1981
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1017 to 1029
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981221138801
