This project was carried out to review and advance the state of the practice in modeling the effects of highway congestion and highway pricing on travelers decisions, including the choice of facility, choice of route, choice of mode and choice of time of day. The research in this SHRP2 C04 topic, “Improving Our Understanding of How Highway Congestion and Pricing Affect Travel Demand,” is reported in three parts of this report as described below. The Executive Summary is intended to provide an overview of the research and its key findings. It is intended to be useful for those who do not have extensive experience in travel demand modeling, but wish to learn about and apply the results of the modeling research. This chapter provides a brief summary of the objective, data and methods that comprised this research, summarize the key findings, and highlights the recommendations for further research. For each finding, we provide a brief discussion of the behavioral modeling issues, a summary of what our analysis showed, a discussion of the implications for transportation policy, and, when relevant, recommendations for further focused research efforts. The Technical Report is: Chapters 1 through 6 comprise the main technical report and provide an organized presentation of our research methods and findings, with more depth and technical detail than in the Executive Summary. The Technical Report is intended for those who carry out or direct modeling into highway congestion and pricing policies, and for planners and decision-makers who would like to gain a deeper technical appreciation and understanding of particular issues. Due to the specialized and technical nature of the research topic, the presentation assumes some prior knowledge of the methods and terminology used in discrete choice modeling. The discussion in the main report is organized around specific modeling questions and hypotheses that were tested, rather than around specific data sets and choice models Chapter 1 of this report describes the research objectives and main methodology applied. Chapter 2 describes the review of available and the selection of the main data sources used for the statistical estimation tests of the travel demand models. The main results of the C04 research described in Chapter 3 are organized in a two-dimensional fashion, structured by model types–route choice, time-of-day choice, mode choice, etc.; and by model features. The Technical Appendices: –main utility specification, segmentation, incorporation of reliability, etc. The corresponding components from the different models estimated with data from different regions are compared back-to-back in a focused way. Chapter 4 covers the network simulation procedures needed to support congestion and pricing studies. Chapter 5 describes the incorporation of the results of the research in operational models in practice. Conclusions, main findings, and recommendations for future research are summarized in Chapter 6. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting