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

这个教师早期职业发展（CAREER）项目将告知共同的政策选择是否收取某些交通服务和设施的使用价格，如计量停车或免费过境。这项研究将扩展道路和运输系统的模型，以考虑到价格增加或取消时出现的特殊考虑，例如，有票价和没有票价的巴士上车时间的差异。该项目还将通过模拟考虑公平因素，这些模拟经过校准以代表真实的社区，以捕捉政策对社会人口群体和收入水平的影响。该项目还将进行调查，以了解人们对替代定价策略的态度，并将阐明人们如何看待运输定价的公平性。此外，补充研究的教育任务将为土木工程专业的学生提供严格思考实施真实的政策的经验，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，通过积极和互动的学习机会进一步传播影响，以扩大STEM的参与。该项目的主要目标是追踪运输系统在零价格时表现出的不连续行为的后果。例如，在实行价格后，需求急剧下降，供应商和用户双方的交易成本都增加。这些和其他不连续性将被插入到正式的交通模型中，在这个模型中，个人的选择相互影响，导致平衡。这些模型将被应用到最优的公交系统设计和交通分配的问题，调查如何最好地形式化的零价格效应在广义成本函数和平衡的存在性和稳定性。详细的微观模拟将用于（i）验证正式模型得出的结果，（ii）检查合理的政策对合成人口的公平影响，以及（iii）测试关于次优价格的原始假设。该项目打算调查，鉴于交通外部性，如延误和污染是凸向交通流量和交通需求是凸向价格接近零，即使是在拥挤的道路上引入低收费和停车费可以捕获的好处，更高的，福利最大化的收费和收费获得的很大一部分。通过调查研究，将系统性地掌握公众对经济政策的理解的新研究方法首次延伸到交通定价领域。该奖项体现了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的知识价值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.