Credit-based Pricing for Multi-user Class Transportation Facilities

This paper proposes an innovative arc-based credit (ABC) congestion pricing scheme to improve the system performance in a transportation network. By associating each arc with apositive or negative credit rate, the strategy can accomplish multiple planning goals, such as efficiency, fairness, and public acceptance simultaneously. We first demonstrate that on a one-origin or one-destination network, a pareto-improving, system-optimal and revenue-neutral credit scheme always exists and can be obtained by solving a set of linear equations. Recognizing that such a credit scheme may not exist in a multi-origin network, we then define the maximum-revenue problem with pareto-improving constrains (MRPI): find the maximum possible revenue collected by the credit scheme with optimal arc flows and non-increasing origin-destination (OD) travel costs. We discover that the dual of MRPI is equivalent to a typical Transportation Problem which, therefore, provides a simple way to calculate the revenue by just examining the dual problem. At the end of the paper, a numerical example with a small synthetic network is provided for the comparison of the credit scheme with other existing toll schemes in terms of OD travel disutilities.