A Pricing Model for Dedicated Mixed-Traffic Lane with Bounded Rationality

The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system has been regarded as an effective way to solve the congestion problem and relieve environmental pollution. While dedicated BRT lanes have been widely deployed in urban cities to improve the efficiency of BRT buses, it also faces the issue of wasting lane resources and aggravating the congestion degree of regular lanes. In view of the contradictory problems, this paper proposes an innovative traffic management method to share the right-of-way of dedicated BRT lanes with cars and collect fees from them and develops a mixed-traffic model for dedicated BRT lanes. Based on the binary logit model of bounded rationality, a pricing model of cars is constructed to control the traffic flow in the dedicated lane. In order to calibrate the parameters in the binary logit model, this study adopts a questionnaire to obtain the travel behavior preferences and choice characteristics of travelers and applies genetic algorithm to fit the parameters. The optimal parameters are obtained by solving an optimization problem. Beijing BRT line 1 is taken as an example to conduct simulation experiments and verify the BRT mixed-traffic model. The experiment results validate the feasibility of the mixed-traffic model and show that the traffic flow of cars can be regulated by optimizing the pricing strategy, which implies that the mixed-traffic pricing model could make full use of road resources under the premise of guaranteeing the operation of buses.