Freeway passenger car drivers' travel choice behaviour in a distance-based toll system

At present, Taiwan's freeways adopt frequency-based toll collection mechanism, and the distances between toll stations are about the same. The current toll mechanism cannot differentiate the actual distances travelled by freeway users. To fulfil the purpose of fairness and equity, distance-based toll collection will be put into practice in 2013. It is, therefore, interesting to study the effects of toll rates on passenger car drivers' travel choice behaviour, including departure time and route. Samples are further segmented by trip lengths into short, medium and long distances, respectively. Mixed logit models, which take individual heterogeneity into account, are estimated and the results find that travel time is an important variable influencing the choice of travel behaviour in the long distance model. Other significant variables include choice inertia, frequency of freeway use, time of freeway use, trip purpose, whether drivers pass toll plaza, toll rate, etc. The signs of the estimated parameters all fit prior knowledge and are statistically significant. The results also show the toll revenue for different scenario is less than the toll fee in the original per-entry-based toll collection system, indicating that these results are in line with the government’s commitment. In the future, if the distance-based system results in differential pricing, this study’s findings may serve as a reference.