Pareto-Improving Road Pricing Schemes for Sustainable Mobility

Contracting Agency: National Science Foundation (NSF)

PI: Yafeng Yin, Ph.D.

The main objective of this research is to provide a rigorous framework and methodologies for developing road pricing schemes amenable to gaining public acceptance and leading to sustainable, environmentally and otherwise, transportation systems. The approach proposed in this research represents a departure from the principle commonly advocated in the literature, which is to reduce congestion to its minimum level. Such approach is extreme and often leads to inequity. Instead, this research seeks a road pricing scheme that makes no one worse off and some better off and aims at reducing, not necessary to their minimum levels, both congestion and traffic emissions.

The latter is essential to achieving an environmentally sustainable transportation system. Although many have recognized it as an efficient method to achieve sustainable mobility and successful implementations exist worldwide, getting the public to accept road pricing remains a major obstacle. The results from this research should, directly or otherwise, mitigate this skeptical public opinion and lead to more implementations of road pricing projects. Although the main focus of this research is on transportation systems, results from this research are also applicable in computer science especially in developing pricing strategies to differentiate services in future Internet and telecommunication networks.