Modeling private toll roads with heterogeneous users

Many existing traffic forecasts assume a single value-of-time for all road users in network equilibrium models. This paper relaxes this limitation by considering different value of time for different people. Users are divided into a number of groups or classes according to their values of time. Each group has a distinct group-specific demand function to characterize its trip rates. Users are assumed to minimize their individual generalized cost, thus they choose routes on the basis of travel time and monetary cost. With this explicit consideration of user heterogeneity, various possibilities of profitability and welfare gain of a private toll road in a given network under various combinations of road capacity and toll charge are presented. We also compare and contrast the outcomes with the case of a single average value of time, and investigate how the value of time distribution affects the traffic flow and profit forecasts