Modeling and managing morning commute with both household and individual travels

Abstract

This study investigates the morning commute problem with both household and individual travels, where the household travel is a shared ride of household (family) members. In particular, it considers the situation when a proportion of commuters have to drive their children to school first and then go to work (household travel). For household travel, departure time choice is a joint decision based on all household membersÕ preferences. Unlike the standard bottleneck model, the rush-hour dynamic traffic pattern with mixed travelers (household travelers and individual travelers) varies with the numbers of individual travelers and households, as well as the schedule difference between school and work. Given the numbers of individual travelers and households, we show that by appropriately coordinating the schedules of work and school, the traffic congestion at the highway bottleneck can be relieved, and hence the total travel cost can be reduced. This is because, departure/arrival of individual and household travels can be separated by schedule coordination. System performance under schedule coordination is quantified in terms of the relative proportions of the two classes of travelers and is compared with the extreme case when the same desired arrival time applies to both schooling and working. Furthermore, the efficiency of work and school schedule coordination in reducing travel cost is bounded. This efficiency is also compared with that at the system optimum where queuing is fully eliminated and schedule delay cost is minimized (achieved by a joint scheme of first-best pricing and schedule coordination).

A new look at the morning commute with household shared-ride: How does school location play a role?

“…Besides the N w individuals, there are N sw households with home-school-work trips. Following Jia et al (2016) and Liu et al (2016), we consider that each household trip consists of a work trip for one adult and a school trip for one child. Therefore, there are N sw vehicles each carrying two travellers: an adult and a child.…”

“…More recently, Liu et al (2016) further extended Jia et al (2016) by looking into a more general situation with both shared-ride travellers (on home-school-work trips) and individual travellers (on home-work trips). In the similar spirit of staggered work hours (as those in Henderson, 1981;Yushimito et al, 2014;Takayama, 2015), Liu et al (2016) proposed to coordinate the schedules of school and work to reduce traffic congestion and travel cost of road users.…”

“…Both Jia et al (2016) and Liu et al (2016) examined the household travelling in a particular setting, i.e., household travellers firstly pass through the congested highway bottleneck, which is the major driving part of the trip, and then reach the school, and finally the workplace, as shown in Figure 1a. However, it is quite often that schools are located near homes (for example, it is common in Chinese cities that children go to schools near homes) such that the adult member in a household firstly drives to school with no or very light congestion (generally far from the city center and the congested network), and then pass through the congested highway (the major driving part for the trip) and finally reach the workplace as in Figure 1b.…”

“…This paper considers the school-near-home network structure in Figure 1b, aiming to identify the difference in resulting equilibrium traffic patterns from those in Liu et al (2016) and elucidate how different school locations (school near home or school near workplace) would shape the morning commute with mixed travels of households and individuals differently. After presenting the trip-timing and traffic patterns at the dynamic user equilibrium, we then propose and analyse three strategies to reduce the total social cost, which is the sume of travel time cost and schedule delay cost.…”

“…Section 2 presents the problem description and the cost formulations for both households and individuals. In Section 3, the dynamic traffic patterns at the departure/arrival equilibrium with mixed travellers are discussed and compared with those in Liu et al (2016). Section 4 examines the system performance under given numbers of individual and household travellers, and work and school schedules, and then analyses three strategies to reduce the total travel cost.…”