CAREER: The Choice of Free vs. Priced for Transportation Systems

这一学院早期职业发展(CALOR)项目将为共同的政策选择提供参考，即是否对某些交通服务和设施的使用收费，如计价器停车或免费交通。这项研究将扩展道路和交通系统的模型，以考虑在增加或取消价格时出现的特殊考虑因素，例如，在有票价和没有票价的情况下公交车上车时间的差异。该项目还将通过模拟来考虑公平因素，这些模拟经过校准以代表真实的社区，以捕捉社会人口群体和收入水平的政策影响。该项目还将进行调查，以了解人们对替代定价策略的态度，并将阐明人们对交通定价公平性的看法。此外，与研究相辅相成的教育任务将给土木工程专业的学生提供严格思考落实实际政策的经验，并使交通工程知识更容易获得。研究、教育和推广计划紧密结合在一起，通过积极和互动的学习机会进一步传播影响，以扩大对STEM的参与。该项目的主要目标是追踪零价运输系统表现出的不连续行为的后果。例如，当引入价格时，需求急剧下降，供应商和用户端的交易成本都会上升。这些不连续和其他不连续将被插入到正式的交通模型中，在该模型中，个人的选择相互影响，导致均衡。这些模型将应用于最优公交系统设计和交通分配问题，研究如何最好地在广义成本函数中形式化零价效应以及均衡的存在性和稳定性。详细的微观模拟将被用来(I)验证从正式模型得出的结果，(Ii)检验看似合理的政策对合成人口的公平影响，以及(Iii)检验关于次优价格的原始假设。该项目旨在调查，鉴于延误和污染等交通外部性对交通流是凸起的，交通需求凸起到价格接近零的水平，即使在拥堵的道路上引入低通行费和停车费，是否可以获得更高的、福利最大化的通行费和收费所获得的大量好处。一项调查研究将首次将系统地捕捉公众对经济政策的推理的新研究方法扩展到交通定价领域。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project will inform common policy choices about whether to charge prices for the use of certain transportation services and facilities, such as metering parking or fare-free transit. The research will extend models of road and transit systems to account for special considerations that arise when prices are added or removed, e.g., the difference in bus boarding times with and without fares. The project will also consider equity factors through simulations calibrated to represent real communities, to capture policy impacts across sociodemographic groups and income levels. The project will also conduct surveys to understand people's attitudes towards alternative pricing strategies and will illuminate how people think about the fairness of transportation pricing. In addition, educational tasks complementary to the research will give civil engineering students experience in thinking rigorously about implementing real policies and make knowledge of transportation engineering more accessible. The research, education and outreach plans are tightly integrated, to further disseminate the impacts through active and interactive learning opportunities to broaden participation in STEM. The primary goal of the project is to trace the consequences of the discontinuous behavior that transportation systems exhibit at the zero price. For example, when prices are introduced, demand drops sharply and both provider- and user-side transaction costs arise. These and other discontinuities will be inserted into formal transportation models in which individuals' choices affect one another, leading to equilibrium. These models will be applied to problems of optimal transit system design and traffic assignment, with investigations into how best to formalize the Zero-Price Effect in generalized cost functions and the existence and stability of equilibria. Detailed microsimulations will be used to (i) validate results derived from the formal models, (ii) check the equity impacts of plausible policies over synthetic populations and (iii) test an original hypothesis about sub-optimal prices. The project intends to investigate if, given that traffic externalities such as delay and pollution are convex to traffic flow and traffic demand is convex to price near zero, introducing even low tolls and parking charges on congested roads can capture a substantial share of the benefits that higher, welfare-maximizing tolls and charges obtain. A survey study will extend novel research methods for systematically capturing the public's reasoning about economic policies into the domain of transportation pricing for the first time.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.