Introduction
Posted by Zhili on May 9th, 2018
Traffic congestion has been a pervasive problem in many metropolises. Congestion pricing, one of the empirically effective measures in mitigating congestion, have been introduced and implemented by local governments.
The implementation of congestion pricing could take various forms, based on the specific traffic conditions. Singapore, in dealing with the congestion occurred in its city’s center, has applied the priced zone with a time-based toll rate; California introduced a priced express lane in parallel operation with free lanes to mitigate congestions on its major highways.
Regarding the special case of congestion happened in Hong Kong’s harbor tunnels, are the above-mentioned measure effective in solving problems? We further investigate the problem and find that congestion in the tunnels usually take the form of uneven distribution of driving flows among those tunnels. A combination of reasons, including unbalanced toll rates and lack of traffic information, contributes to the drivers’ choices of tunnel/route. This motivates our conception of applying the congestion-based toll rates on the tunnels in balancing the distribution of driving flows and further mitigating the congestion.
