Research Of Travel Choice Behavior For Inter-city Trips Under Highway Toll Regulation On Holiday

Intercity travel during holidays is becoming more and more common with the rapid development of society and urbanization.It causes many traffic problems during holidays,such as insufficient capacity on the public transit networks and poor travel experience.Charge reduction measurements on existing toll highways have been implemented to promote efficient use of the highways and to reduce congestion on the public transit networks.However,some of these policies have had negative effects which conversely caused serious traffic jams on the highways.The reason is the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the transportation infrastructure supply capacity and how these policies influence the travel behaviors.This paper investigates the travel choice behavior for inter-city trips under highway toll regulation on holiday.Firstly,a comprehensive review of domestic and international research works is done from four aspects:traffic demand management for intercity traffic during holidays,intercity integrated traffic mode choice,joint traffic mode and departure time choice,and dynamic traffic mode choice.Hereafter,the residents'intercity travel information during the 2017 Spring Festival holiday was collected by the RP&SP questionnaire survey.Based on the RP data,the characteristics of holiday intercity travel behavior was described in terms of time distribution,spatial distribution,and traffic mode characteristics.In addition,according to the RP&SP data,the changes in holiday intercity travel behavior in scenarios with and without highway tolls are compared.At last,specific investigations are performed on the traffic mode choice modeling,traffic mode and departure date joint choice modeling and dynamic traffic mode choice modeling.According to the model results,the travels'cost sensitivity,spatial sensitivity and time sensitivity to the highway tolls are analyzed,and the adaption process of traffic mode choice behavior after policy implementation is identified.The main contents of this dissertation are list as follows.(1)A Mixed Logit model of the inter-city integrated traffic mode choice is developed and estimated by survey data.Five traffic modes are considered:car,airplane,high-speed railway,conventional railway,and coach.Influence mechanism of highway toll on intercity traffic mode choice behavior is studied according to the model result.Specifically,three works have been done.The common attributes of people who are significantly sensitive to the road toll are identified.The cost sensitivities of different public transit modes travelers are compared.The influence of travel distance on the policy effect is analyzed.The result indicates that:?Individual social-economic properties and travel costs are important factors influencing the intercity traffic mode choice.Men and lower-income travelers are identified to be more sensitive to travel cost and further be more likely to change mode in response to the variation of highway toll.?The cost sensitivity of travelers using different traffic modes varies greatly.Among them,coach passengers are the most sensitive to highway tolls,then is high-speed rail passengers.The conventional railway passengers and airplane passengers are the least sensitive.?The cost sensitivity of car travelers shows a monotonously increasing trend with travel distance,which is the opposite of urban commuter traffic.The cost sensitivity of public transit travelers to road tolls shows a trend of firstly increasing and then decreasing as the distance traveled increases.(2)According to the characteristics of joint traffic mode and departure date choice for inter-city trips during holidays,a double-layer Nested Logit model is developed and estimated.Based on the model estimation results,how the cost sensitivity varies for highway toll on different dates is studied by the elasticity analysis method.Finally,the time-differential toll-free policy is proposed.Its influence on the inter-city traffic mode splits and the operation state of traffic is evaluated.The result shows that:?The traffic mode choice for holiday intercity travel is closely related to the departure date choice.There is a significant correlation between the alternatives with the same travel mode but different departure dates.And the correlation for car travelers is higher than that for public transit travelers.?The cost sensitivities for highway tolls on different dates show a great difference due to the constraints of vacation time.(3)The dynamic adaptation process of traveler's traffic choice behavior under highway toll regulations is studied based on evolutionary game theory.First,the population game of traffic mode choice is described.Thereafter,taking the limitations of bounded rationality into account,the mean dynamic process of behavioral optimization procedure is deduced on the basis of the inertia and myopia assumption.After that,the policy response process of traffic choice behavior is modeled based on the replication selection mechanism and the Logit selection mechanism,separately.At the same time,the evolutionary stable strategies of these two models are analyzed.At last,the dynamic adaptation process of traveler:s traffic mode choice under the highway toll regulations is identified and discussed via a numerical case study.The results show that,for the replication dynamic model,a unique local stable equilibrium point exists when the travel utility function satisfies a constraint condition,which equals the corresponding Nash equilibrium strategy.By comparison,for the Logit dynamic model,a unique global stable equilibrium point always exists.However,the Logit dynamic model will overestimate the car split when the car split in the Nash equilibrium state is less than 0.5;conversely,the Logit dynamic model will underestimate the car splits.The research conclusions are expected to provide a reference for the highway toll management on holidays to avoid highway congestion.