Traffic congestion mitigation: combining engineering and economic perspectives

Abstract

This paper introduces and provides a context for a special issue consisting of five selected papers that examine traffic congestion mitigation, with a focus on combining engineering and economic perspectives. Each paper provides novel insights of their own. The papers cover the modeling of parking behavior using possibility theory as well as the evaluation of a novel concept called Highway Space Inventory Control, where drivers must book in advance for their highway usage. A further paper evaluates the implications of new types of traffic pricing schemes and the challenges they face. Another paper tackles exactly this problem by evaluating different measures using data from the Netherlands. A fourth paper examines the implications of a disaster (bridge collapse) on traffic and assigns an economic value to such an outcome. The final paper is a case study that shows that price-based mechanisms may not be the best way to curb congestion.