Public transport and road pricing: a survey and simulation experiments

Abstract

This paper examines the interrelationships between public transport and road pricing at both theoretical and empirical grounds. First, the main decision parameters of the interplay between road pricing and public transport are reviewed and appropriate methodological approaches are identified. A set of policies which aim at improving urban public transport ridership and reducing private vehicle use, are considered on the basis of a flexible consumer demand system and evaluated through simulation experiments. The experiments focus on the hypothetical implementation of a national distance-based road charging policy package in Greece. The simulation results indicate that a suitably designed policy package can significantly enhance modal split in favor of public transport without significantly increasing the level of road user charges. To be more specific, for a nation-wide scheme, a combination of an optimal vehicle-km charge (in terms of the optimal fuel price index share required to achieve the desired urban public transport expenditure share) with a half-fare policy results in a considerable reduction of the private vehicle expenditure share, but with a much lower level of road user charge. For the highly urbanized region of Attica, the imposition of the optimal vehicle-km charge per se (without affecting urban transit fares) can provide the largest benefits, in terms of considerably reducing private vehicle share and attaining the target level of urban public transport share.

Planning and Design of Equitable Free-Floating Bike-Sharing Systems Implementing a Road Pricing Strategy

“…The most common way to redistribute revenues consists in spending on specific transportation-related improvements (i.e., increasing the transit service quality and/or encouraging the modal shift): London, for example, has used most of the revenues to increase its bus services reliability [15]. Alternatively, it could be addressed to the road network, aiming at enhancing its capacity and reducing congestion [16]. Another feasible method is to redistribute revenues to individuals rather than spending on public work: think, for instance, to the credit-based congestion pricing, where all drivers receive a share of the previous month's collected revenues [17].…”

The application of just distribution theories to financing integrated systems of regional and urban public transport

“…The fact that the implementation cases of fare charging, based on e-cards in entry-exit or only-entry identification systems, in Poland most frequently in small and medium cities could be an example. The project becomes more and more costly and complicated with increasing city size, the number of operators and the diversification of public transport reach and the transport offer [16,19]. Possibilities offered by IT permanently grow, which results from information science development in terms of hardware and software, as well as data transmission.…”

Zone‐based tariff design in public transportation networks

“…Of course, a customer pays only for an accessed zone (25) and this payment must be equal to the zone price, if the customer uses the zone and public transport, which is ensures by (26) and (27). Finally, the payment of a customer is equal to the sum of payments for each zone (28).…”

“…This problem is proven to be strongly NP ‐hard and—as we will see in Section 2—is a special case of the tariff design with cumulative pricing problem under a given zoning. Another topic in this field is congestion pricing in road networks, where prices are varied according to the current traffic situation (see for an overview).…”