Multiple Equilibrium Behaviors considering Human Exposure to Vehicular Emissions

Emissions produced by urban transportation activities are harmful to people’s health and they also affect people’s trip-making decisions. In this paper, we explore the multiple equilibrium behaviors considering human exposure to vehicular emissions. We assume that a portion of transportation users are environmental advocates and their route decisions are based on some composite cost functions comprise of a travel time component and an emission exposure component. We then study the multiple equilibrium behaviors with multiple types of users on a traffic network. The multiple equilibrium problems are further converted into variational inequality (VI) problems and they are solved using a method of successive average- (MSA-) based diagonalization method. Per the specific network setting, we find that as travelers become more concerned about their exposure to vehicular emissions, the system emission exposure, travel time, and the total cost get reduced; i.e., Pareto improving solutions are achieved. By analyzing the multiple equilibrium behaviors, we find that the system gets better if more users become environmental advocates. And the change of a small percentage of users should already lead to a good system improvement.