Conceptual development and economic evaluation of Multilevel Premium Highways

A variety of innovative value pricing schemes have been applied in the US to mitigate traffic congestion in a sustainable manner. This paper proposes a new concept, called Multilevel Premium Highways (MPH), to tackle traffic congestion with different options addressing travelers' diverse needs. The new concept is featured by: (i) a fully priced highway with hierarchical speeds designated on different lanes; (ii) a discriminated toll strategy; and (iii) a package of complementary services directly funded by the toll revenues. To examine the effectiveness of MPH, this paper firstly develops a qualitative comparison with the conventional value pricing (VP) schemes, and conducts a spreadsheet-based benefit-cost analysis under two scenarios with the realistic input data, and then performs a sensitivity analysis to examine the impacts of key factors (e.g., traffic demand and travelers’ willingness-to-pay). Discrete choice models are also applied to unveil the impacts of heterogeneous travelers on the performance of MPH. Results show that MPH appears to be economically and financially sustainable for large-scale applications, although the initial settings (e.g., the designated speeds and toll values) of highway lanes influence the relative performance between MPH and the conventional VP schemes.