Congestion Pricing

Congestion costs highway users billions of dollars every year. Although policymakers have adopted a variety of strategies for reducing or mitigating congestion, relatively little attention has been paid to policies to promote more efficient use of the highway system. One such policy is congestion pricing, under which drivers are charged a higher price for use of a highway at times or places with heavy traffic and a lower price in the opposite circumstances. This book explains how congestion pricing works, reviews the best available evidence on projects that make use of such pricing in order to assess the benefits and challenges of the approach, and discusses federal policy options for encouraging congestion pricing. Congestion pricing also can be linked to strategies to improve mobility by making alternatives to the private automobile, such as subways, buses or commuter rail service, more attractive during peak periods. The revenues generated by such pricing have sometimes been used to pay for improvements in public transportation systems. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

. . . this book is an interesting collection of papers on the topic of road congestion pricing. . . The reader should find this collection to be both interesting and informative, but also quite thought-provoking. . . The papers also provide some very useful information about projects that have not worked or have not been implemented for various reasons and lessons that can be learnt from failures to implement and failures of pricing schemes. Peter R. Stopher, International Planning Studies In February 2003, the London Congestion Charging Scheme was introduced and in 2006 a similar policy was introduced in Stockholm. In both cases automobile traffic entering the cordon declined by about 20 percent. This book evaluates these and other similar programs exploring their implications for the United States. While there is increasing interest in road pricing in the US in many individual states, the motivation is often highway financing rather than congestion relief. The contributors argue that the prospects for extensive implementation in the US remain uncertain. Nevertheless, this book illustrates that the European experience suggests political feasibility is much less of a hurdle than was once considered and that congestion pricing would have a significant impact in reducing traffic as it did in Europe. This study s value lies in the fact that it examines road pricing in the real world and not simply from a theoretical viewpoint. As a comparative study it will appeal to both policymakers and academics in transportation economics and planning, urban economics, planning and economic geography.

Road congestion imposes major financial, social, and environmental costs. One solution is the operation of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes. This book outlines a method for dynamic pricing for HOT lanes based on non-linear programming (NLP) techniques, finite difference stochastic approximation, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing stochastic algorithms, working within a cell transmission framework. The result is a solution for optimal flow and optimal toll to minimize total travel time and reduce congestion. ANOVA results are presented which show differences in the performance of the NLP algorithms in solving this problem and reducing travel time, and econometric forecasting methods utilizing vector autoregressive techniques are shown to successfully forecast demand. The book compares different optimization approaches It presents case studies from around the world, such as the I-95 Express HOT Lane in Miami, USA Applications of Heuristic Algorithms to Optimal Road Congestion Pricing is ideal for transportation practitioners and researchers.

"These guidelines are intended for transportation practitioners involved in the planning, design, and operation of congestion-pricing projects. They will help agencies select or develop measures to evaluate these projects, collect the necessary data, track performance, and communicate the results to decision makers, users, and the general public. These guidelines will be valuable to all agencies who are using or considering congestion pricing to manage their roadway capacity."--Foreword.