Can Road Toll Convince Car Travelers to Adjust Their Departure Times? Accounting for the Effect of Choice Behavior under Long and Short Holidays

The adjustment of road toll is an important measure that can alleviate road traffic congestion by convincing car travelers to travel during off-peak times. In order to reduce congestion on the expressway on the first day of a holiday, factors that affect the departure times of holiday travelers must be comprehensively understood to determine the best strategy to persuade car travelers to avoid peak travel times. This paper takes holiday car travelers as the research object and explores the characteristics and rules of departure time choice behavior for different holiday lengths. Based on Utility Maximization Theory, a multinomial logit (MNL) model of departure time choice for a three-day short holiday and a seven-day long holiday was established. Model calibration and elastic analysis were carried out using Revealed Preference/Stated Preference (RP/SP) survey data. Additionally, the influence of the highway toll policy on departure times for long and short holidays was analyzed. The results show that the rate of first-day departures is much higher than that of other departure times for both short and long vacations under the current policy of free holiday passage on highways. Factors such as trip duration, size of the tourist group, the number of visits, travel range, travel time, monthly income, occupation, age and road toll have a significant influence on the departure time decisions of holiday car travelers, and the effect and degree of influence are markedly different for different holiday lengths. The effects of tolls for each departure time and different pricing scenarios on the choice behavior of travelers are different between long and short holidays. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the road toll policy also varies for travelers with different travel distances. This study can provide useful information for the guidance of holiday travelers, the management of holiday tolls on expressways and the formulation of holiday leave time.

The Robust Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows Under Knapsack-Constrained Travel Time Uncertainty

We study the traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW) under travel time uncertainty—modeled by means of an uncertainty set including all travel time vectors of interest. We consider a knapsack-constrained uncertainty set stipulating a nominal and a peak travel time for each arc and an upper bound [Formula: see text] on the sum of all deviations from the nominal times. Viewing the difference between the peak time and its nominal value as the maximum delay possibly incurred when traversing the corresponding arc, the problem we consider is thus to find a tour that remains feasible for up to [Formula: see text] units of delay. This differs from previous studies on robust routing under travel time uncertainty, which have relied on cardinality-constrained sets and only allow for an upper bound on the number of arcs with peak travel time. We propose an exact algorithm based on column generation and dynamic programming that involves effective dominance rules and an extension of the [Formula: see text]-tour relaxation proposed in the literature for the classical TSPTW. The algorithm is able to solve the robust TSPTW under both knapsack- and cardinality-constrained travel time uncertainty. Extensive computational experiments show that the algorithm is successful on instances with up to 80 customers. In addition, we study the impact of the two uncertainty sets on the trade-off between service quality and cost exhibited by the resulting solutions.

Exploratory Analysis of Driver Yielding at Low-Speed, Uncontrolled Crosswalks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

One of the most common circumstances contributing to pedestrian crashes is drivers failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. A better understanding of driver yielding behavior can help identify optimal safety treatments to improve driver yielding and prevent pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Recognizing this need, this study observed driver yielding behavior at 20 uncontrolled intersections along two-lane arterial and collector roadways with posted speed limits of 25 or 30 miles per hour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during weekday afternoon peak travel periods in fall 2016. The naturalistic observations showed that drivers yielded 60 times out of 364 opportunities when the pedestrian wished to cross (16% driver yielding rate). Yielding rates differed between intersections, ranging from a high of 60% to a low of 0%. A binary logistic model showed that drivers were more likely to yield to pedestrians when the major roadway had a lower speed limit or less traffic; when the intersection had a shorter crossing distance or a bus stop; and when the pedestrian was White, standing in the street, or acting assertively. Finally, all else equal, intersections with no reported pedestrian crashes in the last 5 years had higher driver yielding rates than intersections with at least two reported pedestrian crashes. While this exploratory study is based on a small sample of observations, it supports several engineering, education, and enforcement strategies and provides suggestions for future studies of driver yielding behavior.

Research on Passenger Capacity of Escalator in the Hub

Transportation hub is the highly crowd gathering place, and escalatorwith the hub as the main carrier of passengers’ transferring, pitting and otheractivities, it can ensure efficient flow of pedestrians. In recent years, theutilization of escalators in the building and medium-sized transport hubimproved significantly. Its passenger capacity will directly affect theevacuation of pedestrian flow, and it is an important factor in the escalator.Based on the escalator passenger capacity study of the Hohhot Railway station ,by analyzing the relationships among speed ,density and flow of the pedestrianwho are carried by escalator within the hub in the peak travel period, wecalculate with the actual carrying capacity of the escalator to arrive at anescalator utilization within the hub. And according to the level of utilizationwe submit reasonable proposals to achieve the purpose of improving the hub.