The General System Model of Vehicle TDM Effect on Urban Road Traffic

Rapid growing congestion in urban areas lead to wide adoption of travel demand management (TDM) policies. However, the effect evaluation of TDMs encounters great difficulty under existing traffic simulation models which in common require a complex road link system to be built and accurate attributes to be assigned to each link. To avoid the fallible and difficult establishing and calibrating process of existing methodologies, a novel way to analyze TDM is proposed in this paper. With travel demand being described as free-flow travel time of a trip and several macroscopic concepts defined, a theoretical methodology is proposed to reveal the interactions between supply and demand. Then the simulation of TDM is transformed into a classic state space analysis problem. Based on this methodology, the general system model of TDM effect on road traffic operation is set up. The proposed model is tested with three TDMs, including driving restriction, staggered shifts and change of trip length distribution. The results prove that the proposed model can provide fast analysis for TDM policies and has a broad application prospect in macro traffic simulation.