System-wide Ramp Metering as a Policy Tool to Induce Efficient Travel in a Freeway Corridor

Urban traffic congestion, with all its negative effects on travel safety, productivity, fuel efficiency and the environment, is becoming an increasingly important issue to address for modern societies. Congestion occurs when travel demand exceeds the carrying capacities of the roadways, but it is not economical to provide capacity that meets the highest demand (thus eliminate congestion all together), because of peaking in urban travel. Economists have suggested the use of congestion pricing to combat traffic congestion. By internalizing the \ congestion externality into travelers' commute costs, a time-dependent toll was shown to able to rid the roadway of congestion entirely. In practice, however, congestion pricing has encountered sizable resistance from the public because it's often perceived as another tax. In this research, we propose to redistribute the congestion externality by controlling commuters' access to the network through ramp metering. Through access control we aim at inducing an efficient travel demand pattern that eliminates congestion inside the network. This idea will be applied to a freeway corridor during morning commute. We will study the proper access control strategies under different corridor network configurations, considering a wide variety of bottleneck location, commuters' distribution at origins, schedule delay functions, values of time on different facilities, the presence of HOV/HOT lanes, and so forth. We also investigate how the proposed ramp metering strategies affect different traveler groups, and whether an equitable metering strategy can be found to achieve the same efficiency goal. Last but not least, the long term effect of the proposed ramp metering strategies on land use development will also be explored.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $64799.00
• Contract Numbers:

  DTRT06-G-0022

  R03-3

• Sponsor Organizations:

  California Department of Transportation

  1227 O Street
  Sacramento, CA  United States  95843
• Performing Organizations:

  Sustainable Transportation Center/ITS-Davis

  ITS-Davis
  University of California, Davis
  Davis, CA  United States  95616
• Principal Investigators:

  Zhang, Michael

• Start Date: 20081001
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20110930
• Source Data: RiP Project 20900

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Congestion pricing; Freeway operations; High occupancy toll lanes; High occupancy vehicle lanes; Ramp metering; Research projects; Traffic congestion
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Research;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01468378
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: University of California Transportation Center/Institute of Transportation Studies
• Contract Numbers: DTRT06-G-0022, R03-3
• Files: UTC, RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 3:50PM