Browsing by Subject "Congestion pricing"

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Benefit and Cost Analysis of the I-394 MnPASS Program
(Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2012-02) Cao, Xinyu (Jason); Munnich, Lee; Liu, Henry; He, Xiaozheng (Sean); Xu, Zhiyi; Huang, Yan (Arthur)
In this report, we explored the benefits and costs associated with converting the I-394 High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes. The study focused on the I-394 corridor, with a 10-year timeframe from 2006 to 2015. The benefits included travel time savings, safety benefits, and vehicle operating cost savings, and the costs consisted of capital costs and annual operating costs. Where applicable, the implementation of this study followed the benefit-cost analysis guidance of MnDOT. This study considered the benefits of both travel time savings and travel time reliability and the valuations of travel time savings and reliability were derived from econometric models for individual drivers’ behavior. HOT lane users choose the lanes because of travel time savings and/or the reliability of the lanes whereas previous studies considered only travel time savings and exclusively relied on standardized economic value of travel time. This study estimated safety benefits from crash reduction using the Empirical Bayes method. Previous studies scarcely considered the benefits resulting from the conversion of HOV lanes to HOT lanes. This study also showed that “naïve” approaches tended to overstate safety benefits, which highlighted the importance of using a sound methodology.
Collaboration in Fighting Traffic Congestion: A Study of Minnesota’s Urban Partnership Agreement
(University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, 2008-12) Bryson, John M.; Crosby, Barbara C.; Stone, Melissa M.; Mortensen, J. Clare
The Twin Cities metropolitan area was selected to participate in a federal transportation initiative called the Urban Partnership program. This required the formation of a multi-agency collaboration of transportation-focused groups in the Twin Cities area. This collaboration – including the external forces affecting it, the internal processes, structures, and competencies that allowed it to operate, and its accountability mechanisms – is the focus of this analysis. Confirming lessons found in the collaboration literature, the Minnesota UPA is a complex assembly of human (individuals and relationships) and non-human (technologies, artifacts, laws, and procedures) elements; therefore, it is not an easy answer to hard problems but a hard answer to hard problems. The research highlights some new findings. Most notably: the role of technology; linkages connecting high-level federal policymaking to local, operational implementation details; emphasis on multiple roles played by sponsors, champions, neutral conveners, process designers, and technical experts; importance of specific competencies; the role of rules and routines as drivers of collaboration; and the importance of spatial and temporal organizational ambidexterity. It is important to note that the work of this collaboration thus far has been virtually invisible to the public, but that will change in the upcoming stages of UPA implementation.
Congestion Costs and Congestion Pricing for the Twin Cities
(Minnesota Department of Transportation, 1996-08) Anderson, David; Mohring, Herbert
This report offers an economic analysis of the impact of road pricing. Optimal pricing of congested roads would produce substantial revenues and efficiency gains. However, the direct effect of road pricing would be to make most drivers worse off, particularly those with low incomes. In the Twin Cities, pricing all congested roads optimally would generate $1.50-$1.75 in revenues for each dollar of additional costs to travelers. The revenues offer a source of potential funding to compensate those who lose while leaving appreciable toll revenues for highway improvements and other public purposes. The authors believe that unless such toll-revenue redistribution occurs, opposition to road pricing will be substantial. Researchers calculated network equilibria for a variety of congestion-pricing and analyzed these potential income-distributional effects. They allowed the demand for travel to be price-sensitive and for drivers to differ in the valuations they place on time. Pricing all congested roads optimally would increase total travel costs by 18-42 percent, depending on the elasticity of demand for travel. With unit-elastic demand, pricing would increase travel costs by 31 percent and 5 percent for, respectively, the lowest and highest income groups examined.
Determining the Value of Real Time Congestion Information for Commercial Vehicle Operators
(Minnesota Department of Transportation, 1999-04) Beier, Frederick J.
In this project, researchers sent mail surveys to commercial vehicle operators (CVOs)--for-hire arriers and private fleet operations-in the Twin Cities to determine their use of congestion information and their ability to attach specific values to congestion costs. The project also assessed the ability of CVOs to avoid congestion. The report presents survey findings. Despite the fact that a vast majority of respondents indicated congestion information would be useful, CVOs do not rely currently on available congestion information to any significant extent. The reasons may include lack of awareness and/or an inability of CVOs to effectively use the form and content of the information. For-hire carriers also are not well-equipped to estimate congestion costs with any degree of confidence. This results from apparently inadequate costing systems and/or technology to capture costs at the vehicle level. Further, respondents said that they had very little flexibility to adjust schedules to avoid congestion. Also, shippers without private fleets feel significantly less strongly about congestion as a problem than their counterparts with such fleets. Thus carriers maybe constrained in their ability to use congestion information. The report also contains a demographic profile of CVOs operating in the Twin Cities and recommendations for further research.
Dynamics of Cross-Sector Collaboration: Minnesota's Urban Partnership Agreement from Start to Finish
(Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, Center for Transportation Studies, 2012-02) Bryson, John M.; Crosby, Barbara C.; Stone, Melissa M.; Saunoi-Sandgren, Emily
The problems faced by today's public managers are often too large to be solved by a single entity, and require collaboration across government, nonprofit, and business sectors. As new technologies and systematic approaches transform the transportation field, cross-sector collaboration has become an increasingly important policy development and implementation approach. Particularly within the transportation field, an assemblage of technologies is often critical to implementing system-wide strategies aimed at, for example, mitigating traffic congestion. In many cases, designers and implementers of effective transportation policies must combine a variety of technologies with deft relationship building and management. Through the development of comparative case studies of the Urban Partnership Agreement (UPA) initiatives, this research study will complete the examination from start to finish of the Minnesota UPA, and provide additional comparative information from other UPA sites to enhance the certainty of conclusions, and to develop sound lessons for practitioners.
I-394 Phase II Planning Study
(Center for Transportation Studies, 2010-07) Munnich, Lee W. Jr.; Buckeye, Kenneth
The I-394 MnPASS Phase II Planning Study was a multi-agency collaboration that evaluated four major study elements and their relationships in a congestion priced urban corridor. These included transit, land use, infrastructure and telecommuting. A foundation for this work was the understanding that high-cost capacity expansions were not likely to occur in the corridor for 25 to 30 years despite forecasts of increasing congestion that may threaten efficiency gains achieved with conversion of the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to high- occupancy toll (HOT) lane operation. Recommendations identified in this study are being used to guide investments in corridor facilities and services by transportation authorities and will also be used by communities adjacent to the corridor. Transit supportive land use recommendations, if implemented, can help ensure that a high level of service is maintained in the corridor for all users. While specific funding for implementation of these recommendations was not identified prior to the planning process, several compelling transit, land use and telecommuting recommendations are currently being advanced for programming. This project is a valuable case study and potential model for linking land use, transit, telecommuting and congestion pricing in a high-demand urban corridor.
Identifying the combined effect of shared autonomous vehicles and congestion pricing on regional job accessibility
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Zhong, Shaopeng; Cheng, Rong; Li, Xufeng; Wang, Zhong; Jiang, Yu
Most of the existing research on shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) and road congestion pricing have studied the short-term impact on traffic flow. These types of studies focused on the influences on mobility and ignored the long-term impacts on regional job accessibility. Given this, from the perspective of land use and transportation integration, this study explored the long-term effects of SAVs and cordon-based congestion pricing on regional land use, transportation, and job accessibility. The contributions of this study have been summarized by the following three purposes. First, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study was the first attempt to identify the long-term impact of the combination of these two technologies on regional job accessibility. Second, compared to the previous research methodology, this study adopted the land use and transportation integrated model (TRANUS model) and scenario planning to ensure the comprehensiveness and validity of the results. Third, this study analyzed the spatial heterogeneity of the impact of the combination of the two technologies on regional job accessibility in different areas with different built-environment attributes. To realize this purpose, this study quantitatively classified traffic analysis zones (TAZs) using data mining technology, i.e., factor analysis and clustering analysis. Results showed that the introduction of SAVs will contribute to job and population development in the charging zone and reduce the negative effect of road congestion pricing. From the perspective of reducing the average travel time between TAZs, the best strategy will be to implement SAVs alone, followed by integrated use of SAVs and road congestion pricing, while the worst strategy will be to implement the cordon-based congestion pricing policy alone. By comparison, from the perspective of improving regional job accessibility, the effect of introducing SAVs was better than that of road congestion pricing, while the combination of these two technologies was not superior to implementing SAVs alone.
Minnesota Value Pricing Outreach and Education
(Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2006-10) Munnich, Lee Jr; Patterson, Tyler
The State and Local Policy Program (SLPP) of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) and the Metropolitan Council originally designed a project that envisioned extensive research, outreach, and education activities leading to identification and support for a demonstration project by the end of the three year project period. With early acceptance and support for the I-394 MnPASS project by the Governor and Legislature, the Humphrey Institute in collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration revised the project to focus on research, outreach, and education activities focused specifically on the I-394 MnPASS project. The major findings of this project are detailed in the summary and supported by the appendices. The appendices include multiple papers submitted to the Transportation Research Board, final reports from the first two waves of the longitudinal panel survey, the community task force report, and an information booklet designed to quickly educate lawmakers.
MnPASS Modeling and Pricing Algorithm Enhancement
(Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, 2015-05) Hourdos, John; Janson, Michael; Levinson, David; Parikh, Gordon
While High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes have been used for decades as a strategy for mitigating congestion, research has shown that they are not always effective. A 2001 study of the I-394 and I-35W HOV lanes in Minnesota found that the HOV lanes were on average underutilized, moving fewer people than the General-Purpose Lanes (GPL) even with the increased number of passengers per vehicle. To address the issue of underuse, in 2003 the Minnesota Legislature authorized the conversion of the I-394 HOV lanes into High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes, named the MnPASS Express Lanes. The MnPASS lanes operate using a fully dynamic pricing schedule, where pricing is dictated by the level of congestion in the HOT lane. To better understand the nature of HOT lanes and the decisions of their users, this study explored the possibilities for a microscopic traffic simulation-based model of HOT lanes. Based on a series of field studies where the price of the toll was changed while observing changes in demand in the HOT lane, models describing the lane choice behavior of MnPASS users were developed and calibrated. These models interfaced with the traffic simulation software Aimsun through a number of extension modules and tested on the two MnPASS corridors of I-394 and I35W corridors in the west and south suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The integrated HOT simulation tool was also used to develop and test a number of alternative pricing strategies including a more efficient version of the current strategy.
The Urban Partnership Agreement: A Comparative Study of Technology and Collaboration in Transportation Policy Implementation
(Center for Transportation Studies, 2011-04) Bryson, John M.; Crosby, Barbara C.; Stone, Melissa M.; Saunoi-Sandgren, Emily; Imboden, Anders S.
The problems faced by today's public managers are often too large to be solved by a single entity and require collaboration across government, nonprofit, and business sectors. As new technologies and systematic approaches transform the transportation field, cross-sector collaboration has become an increasingly important policy development and implementation approach. Particularly within the transportation field, an assemblage of technologies is often critical to implementing system-wide strategies aimed at, for example, mitigating traffic congestion. In many cases, designers and implementers of effective transportation policies must combine a variety of technologies with deft relationship building and management. Through the development of comparative case studies of three of the Urban Partnership Agreement initiatives, this research study will examine how technology and collaborative processes may be combined to achieve important transportation goals and create public value more generally.

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