Practical application of diversion system for urban expressway networks

Many techniques in intelligent transport systems (ITSs) have been developed for efficient traffic management. In particular, it is planned that electric toll collection (ETC) is practically installed in the expressways system in Japan. A diversion system is proposed as a new technique to resolve traffic congestion by maintaining proper balance of traffic flows between urban expressways and urban streets. It is reported that the diversion system can be applied not only to realize a fair toll system and also to maintain smooth traffic on the loop road located in the centre of the city. If the detour routes can be provided for the users driving through the congested links, traffic condition can be improved. In this study, a stochastic assignment model is introduced to investigate the advantages of the diversion system with different conditions. The effects of introduction of the diversion system is discussed in terms of social surplus. If the traffic flow is controlled with certain techniques, the diversion system gives better performance in terms of total travel time for the urban networks. This result shows that the diversion system can give the benefit to the public corporation as well as drivers