Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 185612, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/185612
Research Article

Commuting Pattern with Park-and-Ride Option for Heterogeneous Commuters

Chengjuan Zhu,1,2 Bin Jia,1,2 Linghui Han,3 and Ziyou Gao3

1State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
2School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
3MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Received 8 February 2013; Revised 17 March 2013; Accepted 17 March 2013

Academic Editor: Leman Akoglu

Copyright © 2013 Chengjuan Zhu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study the effect of the parking on heterogeneous commuters' travel choice in a competitive transportation system which consists of a subway and a parallel road with a bottleneck of limited service capacity. Every morning, commuters either use their private cars only or drive their cars to the bottleneck, park there, and then take the subway to the destination. Considering the effects caused by body congestion in carriage and the parking fees, we developed a bottleneck model to describe the commuters' travel choice. There exist several types of equilibrium that corresponds to user equilibrium. We investigated the influence of the capacity of the bottleneck and the total travel demand on the travel behaviors and on the total social cost. It is shown that there exists a scheme with suitable subway fare and parking fees to implement the minimum total social cost.