Traffic paradox under different equilibrium conditions considering elastic demand

Abstract

Traffic paradox is an important phenomenon which needs attention in transportation network design and traffic management. Previous studies on traffic paradox always examined user equilibrium (UE) or stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) conditions with a fixed traffic demand (FD) and set the travel costs of links as constants under the SUE condition. However, traffic demand is elastic, especially when there are new links added to the network that may induce new traffic demand, and the travel costs of links actually depend on the traffic flows on them. This paper comprehensively investigates the traffic paradox under different equilibrium conditions including the user equilibrium and the stochastic user equilibrium with a fixed and elastic traffic demand. Origin-destination (OD) mean unit travel cost (MUTC) has been chosen as the main index to characterize whether the traffic paradox occurs. The impacts of travelers’ perception errors and travel cost sensitivity on the occurrence of the traffic paradox are also analyzed. The conclusions show that the occurrence of the traffic paradox depends on the traffic demand and equilibrium conditions; higher perception errors of travelers may lead to a better network performance, and a higher travel cost sensitivity will create a reversed traffic paradox. Finally, several appropriate traffic management measures are proposed to avoid the traffic paradox and improve the network performance.