Design of more equitable congestion pricing and tradable credit schemes for multimodal transportation networks

► A modeling framework that considers income effect on travel choices. ► Captures distributional impacts of transport policies. ► Designs more equitable yet efficient congestion pricing or tradable credit schemes. ► Provide insights on mechanisms of achieving better equity. This paper develops a modeling framework that considers the effect of income on travelers’ choices of trip generation, mode and route on multimodal transportation networks and explicitly captures the distributional impacts of congestion–mitigation policies on different income and geographic groups. The modeling framework is applied to design more equitable yet efficient congestion pricing and tradable credit schemes. The design models are formulated as mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, and solved by derivative-free solution algorithms. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the models and offer insight on the mechanisms of achieving better equity under congestion pricing or tradable credit schemes.