On a Flexible Car Use Restriction Policy: Theory and Experiment

Car use restrictions have been adopted in some mega cities that experience rapid car ownership increase and worsening traffic congestion. Although easy to implement and considered fair, most implementations of this travel demand management policy do not offer travelers the flexibility to choose the days that they cannot use their cars. In this paper, we study a flexible car use restriction policy under which a private car cannot be driven on a certain day of a week, but the day can be chosen by its owner. Under this flexible policy, individuals face a dilemma between driving in congestion and traveling without a car, each incurring a cost of its own. The resulting equilibrium solutions under these two competing choices were derived, and a series of laboratory experiments were carried out to validate the theoretical results. The experimental results are found to be in agreement with the theoretical results. Moreover, our analysis shows that the flexible car use restriction policy reduces the average travel cost with a lesser increase in average driving cost when compared with the traditional car use restriction policy.

Automated summary

Car use restrictions have been implemented in some large cities to tackle the growing number of cars and worsening traffic congestion. However, most of these restrictions do not offer flexibility to car owners in choosing the days they cannot drive. This paper studies a flexible car use restriction policy where car owners can choose the restricted day of the week. Theoretical results and laboratory experiments show that this flexible policy reduces average travel cost with a lower increase in average driving cost compared to traditional car use restrictions.