Study On The Impact Of Freeway Toll Rate On Vehicle Route Choice Behavior

With the rapid development of freeway in China, its network develops from the original tree structure to the reticular structure. And traffic on the freeway is becoming more and more, which causes traffic congestion. Of course, complex road transport corridor comprised of freeway and parallel roads leads to diverse path choices for drivers. Therefore, in this paper, in allusion to the limitation that present toll policies and regulations formulated based on time-limited repaid loan have on freeway demand control, the route choice models of vehicles in multimodal roads are built and the impacts of freeway toll rate on motor vehicle route choice behavior, road load, freeway network congetion level and toll revenue are studied and analyzed, which is expected to provide reference for scientificly and reasonablely making toll mode and rate.Firstly, a series of travel scenes for car and truck drivers are assumed respectively after a preliminary analysis on influence factors of vehicle route choice behaviors. And values of various attributes (like travel time, fuel cost and tolls) of different scenes are calculated through fuel consumption estimation method, map matching technologies, etc. Accordingly, a stated preference (SP) survey questionnaire is designed, as well as a survey plan, and then the route choice data are obtained.Secondly, a multinominal logit (MNL) models of vehicles in multimodal roads are established based on analysis of survey data and selection of model variables (like travel time, fuel cost, tolls, vehicle load, good type and personal attributes, etc.), and the accuracy of models is tested and evaluated.Then, based on the selection of short, middle and long distance travel scene, the impacts of freeway toll rate on different types of car and truck drivers’ route choice behavior are analyzed respectively with the models established above.Finally, based on the establishment of topology structure of local freeway network in Shandong province and calculation of effective path sets with the Double-sweep algorithm, freeway route selection probability, freeway traffic OD matrix between the inward and outward and the section traffic under the condition of different toll rate are calculated with vehicle route choice model; and the impact of toll rate on road load, freeway network congetion level and toll revenue are studied and analyzed.This study shows that the freeway toll rate has a little impact on short-distance route choice, but great on long-distance one; and with the increase of toll rate, in case of long-distance travel, the truck drivers’ selection probability of freeway reduces faster than car drivers’. And with the increase of toll rate, road network congestion level becomes higher and higher, and toll revenue originally increases and then decreases. However, with the reduction of toll rate in the flat-rate toll model, the imbalance of the spatial and temporal distribution of traffic will aggravated, which is not conducive to the overall freeway operation. Therefore, in order to ensure that the freeway operate safely and smoothly, both traffic condition and toll revenue should be taken into consideration to scientifically make freeway toll mode and rate.