A Scheme to Improve Network Performance Based on Traffic Restriction and Pricing in the Presence of Carpooling

For the purpose of optimizing the traffic network in the presence of carpooling, a traffic demand management scheme was proposed with the consideration of traffic restriction, carpooling, and road pricing. We establish a variational inequality describing the travelers’ mode and route choice following the logit mode split and multimodal user equilibrium principle in the condition of elastic demand. A bilevel programming was designed with the variational inequality as the lower level and optimization objective function taking into account traffic congestion and social welfare as the upper level. The results show that this scheme is possible to be effective in improving network performance. The higher average occupancy of carpooling vehicles and the carpooling demand may not bring better network performance due to the topology, parameters of the network, and travel demand. The fare of carpooling travelers is possible to impact the network very slightly with this scheme. Besides, the group of travelers who is able to afford more than one vehicle is hardly affected by this scheme