Pareto-improving congestion pricing on multimodal transportation networks

This paper determines a Pareto-improving pricing scheme for alleviating congestion in a multimodal transportation network that includes, e.g., transit services, high-occupancy/toll and general-purpose lanes. In this setting, a pricing scheme refers to a strategy for tolling roads and highways as well as adjusting fares on various transit lines. In addition, such a scheme is Pareto-improving if it maximizes the social benefit without increasing travel-related expense of stakeholders that include individual road users, transit passengers, transit operators, transportation authorities, etc. The user equilibrium and system optimum problem in the multimodal transportation network are discussed along with a model for determining Pareto-improving tolls. The latter is formulated as a mathematical program with complementarity constraints. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate results from various models.