Increased traffic demand across the world leads to increasing negative externalities in terms of congestion, emissions, traffic accidents, noise pollution etc. Congested streets yield more time losses and more emissions than uncontested streets. Thus, both externalities are interrelated. The first goal of this project is to develop an efficient pricing approach for mitigating negative externalities in homogeneous traffic by reducing emission and congestion simultaneously. However, traffic behavior in industrialized countries is different than in newly industrializing countries like India or China where mixed traffic prevails. Car following and lane changing logics are not predominant in the latter countries which makes the situation more complex. Thus, the second goal of this project is to extend the homogeneous emission and congestion pricing model to mixed traffic conditions. In a third step, different strategies to mitigate negative transport externalities will be evaluated by economic impact assessment and compared between scenarios in industrialized and newly industrializing countries. Hereby vehicle emission costs and travel delay costs are calculated at the single-agent, single-vehicle level using existing infrastructure from MATSim.

Amit Agarwal, TU Berlin

DAAD, Germany http://www.daad.de

Publications: see here.

Movies: see here for a comparison of traffic dynamics (with and without backward traveling waves) and for the MATSim model for Patna, India.