Quantification and Analysis of the Decisions of Economically and Environmentally Informed Travelers in Urban Networks

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Aiming at promoting optimal use of transportation infrastructure, the purpose of this project is to quantify and analyze the effects of information provision about energy and environmental costs on travel demand. In addition, this project will identify the most effective instruments to provide information to the travelers. A specific goal of this project is to investigate the mechanisms that travelers use to gather and process information about the actual environmental and energy costs of transportation. These mechanisms will be then used to produce estimates of the willingness to pay of commuters for reducing their travel footprint and to identify the best way of communicating environmental information. An additional goal is to measure the potential efficiency gains in the use of transportation infrastructure when commuters receive information about the actual costs of travel. Finally, the value of the consideration of complete costs for strategic and tactical planning of urban sustainability will be analyzed in a practical setting. More specifically, the transportation-planning model of New York City will be extended to consider economically and environmentally informed travelers. Educational and outreach efforts will include construction of a free community-based application with a web-based version that will provide customized emission information and tips to educate travelers on how to act to reduce their travel footprint. Information and interaction sessions with metropolitan planning organizations will be organized to share the policy results and tools that will come out from this study. One of the main research tasks of this project is the derivation of an econometric approach for travel mode and route choice models to elucidate the behavioral effects of generalized cost information -including energy consumption and emissions. An expected contribution of the econometric approach is the formulation of discrete choice experiments with treatments in the definition of the alternative attributes. The choice situations in this case will include differing treatments on how information about emissions is presented (or omitted), and controlled mechanisms for offsetting those emissions. The econometric approach will result in the estimation of the economic valuation of transportation externalities. Using a semi-parametric formulation, the economic valuation estimates will allow for heterogeneous travelers without imposing restrictive assumptions about how environmental preferences vary across the population. These estimates will be then integrated into the analysis of transportation network equilibrium, and into the design of advanced transportation information systems that are dynamic, consider multiple attributes, and constantly update the information being provided. Regarding network models, this project will analyze consideration of a stochastic feature in link cost estimation rather than in route choice, with the aim of updating current planning models of major metropolitan areas without the need for computationally expensive changes.