Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper investigates the impact of realistic congestion charging regimes where undesired boundary effects of imposing charges may occur and may be both temporal and spatial. Tolling regimes are developed with the primary aim to reduce system cost (total travel time) whilst also aiming to reduce undesired boundary effects. Two realistic toll profile regimes are investigated and tested; the first being flat tolls and the second bell-shaped tolls which represent step-tolls
and their relative impact on the boundary effects are discussed. This paper then investigates the reduction of travel time which may be achieved by applying different toll levels to each link and compares the cases where all links may be tolled against maintaining a single un-tolled route, which would be politically attractive. Existing DUE algorithms are utilised to obtain numerical results.