ASB-TDM: Towards flexible and user-friendly transportation demand management in polycentric metropolitan areas

This paper proposes a novel, flexible and user-friendly approach, namely, attraction site-based transportation demand management (ASB-TDM) to alleviate road congestion and improve social welfare in trip-making, where both pull and push strategies are imposed on attraction sites in polycentric metropolitan areas. Under the ASB-TDM, attraction sites - as the objects under government regulation - are charged for causing excessive congestion at traffic hotspots or subsidized to attract consumers and balance network traffic. The impacts of ASB-TDM can be partially transferred to the travelers. There is a game between the government, attraction sites and travelers. Government, as the leader, aims to maximize social welfare, while the attraction sites pursue maximizing their own profits, and travelers choose the destination and path accordingly so as to maximize individual trip-making utilities. A tri-level programming model is established to study the game, which is then solved using a meta-heuristic solution approach integrating method of successive algorithm, diagonalization algorithm, and elitism-based genetic algorithm. Experiments were conducted based on a four-node network, the Nguyen-Dupuis network, and the Sioux Falls Network. Numerical results indicate that the oligopolistic competition among attraction sites can lead to improved social welfare and alleviated traffic congestion due to the dispersion effects of attraction sites in polycentric metropolitan areas, as the induced travel demand is diverted to underutilized areas (e.g., subcenters). The ASB-TDM scheme with government participation further enhances these benefits by optimizing the competitive dynamics through strategic subsidies and charges, leading to superior outcomes compared to the pure market-driven approach.