Booking cum rationing strategy for equitable travel demand management in road networks.

• Propose a booking cum rationing strategy for equitable travel demand management; • Establish a user equilibrium model to characterize the booking cum rationing strategy. • Formulate the problem as a linear programming problem in a general network. • Use a few simple examples to investigate the benefits of the strategy. • The strategy can maintain fairness, efficiency and flexibility of individual choices. Trip booking and traffic rationing have been proposed as two alternative travel demand management (TDM) strategies over the last two decades. Through artificially restricting demand (vehicle travel) by booking or rationing the scarce road capacity during the peak periods, the negative externalities generated by travel demand over available supply or road capacity can be reduced. In many cases, the two strategies also have the main goal of reduction of air pollution. Trip booking system allows vehicles/drivers to reserve prescribed areas or some lanes/segments of freeways/roads for their use during specific time periods, thereby maintaining a certain level of service of the roadway space. It is often in the form of a permit to control the number of reservations issued. On the other hand, traffic rationing is often achieved in reality through restricting access into an urban cordoned-off area or city center based on the last digits of the license number on pre-established days and during certain periods, usually the peak hours. However, theoretical studies and practical implementation of the two strategies have been conducted separately. Taking their advantages, this paper proposes and demonstrates a novel hybrid strategy of booking cum rationing for efficient and equitable TDM. We show that the problem of interest can be simply formulated as a convenient linear programming problem in a general network. Simple examples are provided to elucidate how this hybrid strategy can achieve a traffic flow distribution pattern prescribed by the traffic planner while maintaining the fairness, efficiency, and flexibility of individual choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]