Highway expansion is usually applied as a method to release traffic congestion. Corresponding to highway expansion, the transit operation strategy may be Pareto-improving or may cause the highway to be more congested, the so called Downs-Thomson Paradox. Under what condition will the transit operation strategy be Pareto-improving? Under what condition will the transit operation strategy cause the Downs-Thomson Paradox? And under what condition will the transit operation strategy change in responsive to the highway expansion? These problems are what we investigate within this work.

In Chapter 2, a bimodal system with highway expansion is investigated, where the Pareto-improving condition and the the Downs-Thomson Paradox’s condition are studied. Then different states of disu...[ Read more ]

Highway expansion is usually applied as a method to release traffic congestion. Corresponding to highway expansion, the transit operation strategy may be Pareto-improving or may cause the highway to be more congested, the so called Downs-Thomson Paradox. Under what condition will the transit operation strategy be Pareto-improving? Under what condition will the transit operation strategy cause the Downs-Thomson Paradox? And under what condition will the transit operation strategy change in responsive to the highway expansion? These problems are what we investigate within this work.

In Chapter 2, a bimodal system with highway expansion is investigated, where the Pareto-improving condition and the the Downs-Thomson Paradox’s condition are studied. Then different states of disutility change of heterogeneous commuters are illustrated. The highlights are: (1) In term of value of time (VOT), commuters are heterogeneous instead of homogeneous; (2) In-vehicle crowding is considered as a cost to describe the discomfort on the transit.

In Chapter 3, the transit operation strategy in responsive to the highway expansion is investigated. And numerical cases are given to verify the result that we find. The highlights are: (1) Find the conditions under which transit frequency will decrease in responsive to highway expansion; (2) Take the in-vehicle crowding cost into consideration to study the change of transit strategies.