Consider a city of arbitrary shape where users are distributed continuously over the city region. Within this region, the road network is dense andcan be represented as a continuum: users patronize a two-dimensional continuum network to the central business district. A congestion-pricing technique is applied to this continuum transportation system to maximise its total social welfare. This study presents the theoretical bounds for the efficiency of this congestion-pricing scheme for both the fixed and elastic demand cases. The ratio of total costs and total social welfare between thesystem-optimal and user-optimal travel patterns are taken as the measuresofthe efficiency in the fixed and elastic demand cases, respectively. With a better understanding of the efficiency of congestion-pricing, trafficplanners can better comprehend the likely benefit that is obtainable froma congestion-pricing scheme. For the covering abstract see ITRD E144727. Reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
Samenvatting