A Model to Assess the Effect of Transportation Demand Management Policies on Urban Long Car Trips

Transportation demand management (TDM), refers to an approach which tends to more efficient use of transportation resources of a city. Typically, car use reduction is said to be the main goal of this approach to avoid congestion problem. A part of daily car usage in cities is due to commuters’ long trips. It is a crucial issue to attract people out of their cars in long trips because of the high proportion of such trips in vehicle-kilometer traveled as a proxy of transportation emission. . This study focuses on managing the demand of long car trips which their destinations are in the central part of the city of Tehran. Therefore, three push policies (i.e., increasing fuel cost, increasing parking cost, and cordon pricing) and two pull policies (i.e., transit time reduction and transit access improvement) are investigated on 240 commuters who their workplaces are in the central part of the city and their driving distance is more than 8 kilometers. Adopting an approach named multi-instrumentality, design of this study is enhanced by considering TDM policies’ interactions. By developing a behavioral mode choice model in form of multinomial logit, significant transportation related variables are discovered and interpreted, respectively. The application of model regarding to the effect of cordon pricing policy on car usage is also presented.