The 20th and 21st joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2020-21)

The freeway tolling policy is prevailing in China, which aims to take back the high cost of freeway construction and maintenance. With the increase of traffic volume and the mixture of different vehicle types, traffic congestions, accidents and pollutions are arising. As one of the potential approach to relieve these issues, an adjustment to the road pricing has been implemented on some freeway in China, i.e., the differentiated truck tolling policy. However, it is difficult to generalized the results to different freeways given different social-economic background and public expectations. Congestion levels, convenience of alternative routes, possibility of other travelling schedules, urgency degree of the deliveries, pricing levels etc. all play a role in determining the way truck drivers will respond to pricing schemes. Accordingly, this study conducted a stated preference (SP) survey of truck driver responses to the potential differentiated truck tolling schemes. It was a discrete choice experiment conducted on Ninghu Freeway of Jiangsu province, China. Then, the departure time choice model and the route choice model were established based on the multinomial logit (MNL) model. The coefficients in the models were identified with the survey results. Furtherly, the discussion and evaluation indicated the impacts of various combinations of charges and incentives on the truck drivers’ choice. The proposed method would be an auxiliary analysis tool for policy makers to initially assess the truck drivers’ reactions to the introduction of freeway differentiated tolling policy.

CICTP