Modeling monetary costs of multi-class traffic flow - Application to the dynamic management of truck lanes

Traffic is composed of different vehicle classes, each characterized by the vehicle length, the value of time (VOT) and other class-specific properties. Multi-class traffic flow models aim to capture these class-specific differences. In this paper, a multi-class model is appended with a monetary cost framework accounting for the value of time of each vehicle class, thereby enabling the computation of the total network costs. Subsequently, the framework is analytically applied to show the conditions under which it is justified to prioritize certain traffic classes in order to maximize the monetary flow (which is equivalent to minimizing the total monetary network costs). An illustrative example is given in which the framework is used to find the conditions (bottleneck capacity, traffic demand, pce, VOT) under which activating a dedicated lane for trucks is beneficial.