Integrating the management and design of urban road network to alleviate tide traffic*

Abstract

During the morning and evening rush hour in big cities, roads present tide traffic feature, which not only worsens the traffic congestion but also wastes road resources. In this paper, we use the lane reversal to balance the asymmetric traffic flow distribution in the two directions of one road and lane addition to increase road supply. Moreover, we use the tradable credits scheme to manage the mobility. Thus, we integrate the lane reversal, lane addition and tradable credits scheme to alleviate the traffic congestion due to tide traffic, which is modeled into a mix-integer bilevel programming. In this model, the network authority decides the lane reversal scheme, lane addition scheme and credits charging scheme to minimize the total system travel time, while the travelers follow the user equilibrium (UE) to minimize their generalized travel cost. After proposing the algorithm for the model, the Sioux Falls network is adopted to illustrate the numerical experiments, which show that the integration of the management and design can obtain the better performance to alleviate tide traffic and traffic congestion.