A Freeway Pricing Model by Development of Stochastic Economic Engineering Models

Each society needs the development of basic infrastructure, including the road. The use of private sector capital is a sustainable and appropriate solution for the development of transport infrastructure, especially freeways. The economic analysis of the freeways in the planning phase and the road pricing are necessary to trust the investors. The investment risk for private investors is reduced by calculating the economic toll rates. Identifying costs and revenues of freeways and defining an approach for calculating toll rates by considering the time value of money and uncertainty in estimation of the costs and revenues is one of the challenges in this industry. In this paper, the annual cost and revenue of a freeway identified and classified by studding documents of some road projects in Iran. Two economic engineering models are developed to determine the economic toll rate with certainty and uncertainty of parameters. The proposed method is implemented on one of the freeways and the results are compared with traditional analysis. The results show that the estimated toll on the freeway is not economically justified in the traditional way.