Manage morning commute problem of household travels under single-step toll: A comparison study

In general, road tolls could alleviate travel congestion for commuters during rush hour and improve the efficiency of individual transport trips. But for the household commuters, whether the road toll management framework can achieve the same effect is still unclear. From this perspective, it is meaningful to understand the difference between the impacts of road toll pricing on individual trips and on household trips. Based on this consideration, this paper investigates the influence of single-step toll strategy on household trips using the ADL model and the braking model. The optimal school-work time gap, optimal toll value and optimal toll interval are obtained for optimizing the total system travel cost. To have a deeper insight into the difference between the three types of models, the ADL, braking and Laih (Jia et al., 2016) models are studied extensively, leading to the following conclusions: (i) Under the optimal strategies in the three single-step household toll models, the optimal school-work time gap ranges and the toll intervals differ, but the optimal toll values are the same; (ii) The ADL model performs optimally in optimizing the total system travel cost, followed by the Laih model; (iii) the total congestion cost decreases with school-work time gap under the optimal strategy of the single-step toll models, and the ADL model performs optimally in this regard. Therefore, management insights can be derived, in which traffic authorities should set proper staggering hours, toll price and interval, as well as cultivate proper travel habits of household travelers, thereby helping to reduce road congestion and improve social welfare. Finally, a comparison of the three toll models through numerical experiments validates our findings.