Search

• The effectiveness of existing traffic measures in Beijing is investigated. • A survey on drivers' opinions and attitudes towards the traffic situation is given. • Most respondents think congestion is still serious in Beijing. • The perceived impact of congestion on personal car use is relatively low. • The symbolic meaning of personal cars has large impact on willingness to change. Facing serious challenges of traffic congestion and air pollution, Beijing has implemented a series of traffic polices. In this paper, we first investigate the effectiveness of existing traffic measures in Beijing and analyse the underlying factors from the perspective of drivers, which provide insights for the traffic regulations in other cities worldwide. While the car ownership restriction has effectively limited the total number of vehicle in Beijing, the effect of the car use restriction only lasts for a short period. A survey on drivers' opinions and attitudes towards the traffic situation and a potential measure, i.e., tradable driving credit (TDC), is conducted. Although traffic data shows that congestion improved and traffic was slightly congested in recent years in Beijing, most respondents believe congestion is still serious in Beijing. However, they think the impact of traffic congestion on their personal car use is relatively low, which could partly explain why so many travellers still depend on driving given the relative convenient transit facilities in Beijing. In addition, a large proportion of respondents treat personal cars as a representation of social status and think driving bring them pleasures, which indicates that it may be hard to further decrease the share of car trips in Beijing. According to their attitudes and social-economical characters, respondents' willingness on their changes of travel behaviours under TDC is investigated. The results show that individuals' social-economic characters such as income level, education and family size and the symbolic meaning of personal cars have significant influence on respondents' willingness to switch to other transport modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid growth of car ownership, traffic congestion has become one of the most serious social problems. For us, accurate real-time travel time predictions are especially important for easing traffic congestion, enabling traffic control and management, and traffic guidance. In this paper, we propose a method to predict urban road travel time by combining XGBoost and LightGBM machine learning models. In order to obtain a relatively complete data set, we mine the GPS data of Beijing and combine them with the weather feature to consider the obtained 14 features as candidate features. By processing and analyzing the data set, we discussed in detail the correlation between each feature and the travel time and the importance of each feature in the model prediction results. Finally, the 10 important features screened by the LightGBM and XGBoost models were used as key features. We use the full feature set and the key feature set as input to the model to explore the effect of different feature combinations on the prediction accuracy of the model and then compare the prediction results of the proposed fusion model with a single model. The results show that the proposed fusion model has great advantages to urban travel time prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming to alleviate traffic jams, many traffic management strategies/policies are adopted to nudge travelers to re-arrange their departure time or switch from driving to public transit or non-motorized mode. Analytical travel behavior model is needed to predict travelers’ departure time choice and mode switch under such strategies. In this paper, we developed an agent-based model for travellers’ choices of mode and departure time. Departing from the traditional utility maximization theory, this model focuses on the decision-making process based on imperfect information, bounded and distinctive rationalities. In the modeling framework, travelers accumulate experiences and update their spatial and temporal knowledge through a Bayesian learning process. Before making a trip, travelers decide whether to search for alternative departure time and/or travel mode according to their expected search gain and cost. When an additional search happens, travelers decide whether or not to switch to the new departure time and travel mode according to a series of decision conditions. Both the search and decision processes are represented by production (if–then) rules derived from a joint revealed/stated-preference survey data collected in Beijing. Then the agent-based model is applied to evaluate congestion charge policies with various demand scenarios in the 2nd ring road of Beijing. Results suggest that the model can display the peak spreading and mode switch process practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]