Title:
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The potential network effects of travellers' responses to travel demand management measures
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There has been a growing acceptance by transportation professionals that the traditional 'predict and provide' transport planning approach will not solve the transport problems that prevail in towns and cities and that Travel Demand Management (TDM) policies will need to play an increasingly important role in towns and cities. However, the extent to which TDM can significantly reduce the growth of traffic, and therefore ease congestion and improve air quality, is uncertain. There is little empirical evidence to substantiate the extent of potential effects. Modelling offers a potential solution but unfortunately a model capable of being used to study all the potential impacts of TDM does not exist, nor does the understanding of the underlying fundamental behavioural responses. Further, the data requirements to calibrate and validate such a model would be enormous. This research aims to assess the potential network benefits/disbenefits of expected traveller responses as a result of TDM policy measures of road pricing, trip suppression and peak spreading. The results of the inelastic modelling undertaken in this work reinforced existing evidence that network performance could deteriorate with increasing toll level as trips re-routed away from tolled facilities to free routes in the boundary areas. Although the results suggested an overall network deterioration as measured from total network vehicle hours, it was found that time savings in excess of three minutes were possible for individual O-D movements using the tolled facilities. Multiple cordons were seen to perform worse than single cordons under inelastic modelling when total network vehicle hours were the comparison criterion. However, their potential to raise revenue was seen to be far higher than that of single cordons. The elastic modelling showed that with only a 2.5% decrease in overall network vehicle hours at normal congestion, the overall network benefits of peak spreading were not very high.
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