“School near workplace” or “school near home”: Which one is better for the morning commute with both individual and household travelers in Y-shaped networks?

Abstract

Household travelers typically need to coordinate their travel decisions in various aspects, such as destination and trip-timing, resulting in distinctive travel patterns compared to individual travelers. This paper investigates the morning commute problem in a “Y-shaped” network featuring “school near workplace” in consideration of both individual and household travelers and further understands the impact of school locations on the morning commute by comparing it with the “school near home” network. We analytically derive all equilibrium cases in the “school near workplace” network and classify them into three traffic patterns. We analyze the welfare effects of the staggering policy, finding that implementing the staggering policy in the “school near workplace” network can achieve a “win–win” scenario for individuals and household travelers in some equilibrium cases. Also, when the capacity ratio of school-constrained bottleneck to common-constrained bottleneck is below a threshold, which one is better (i.e., “school near workplace” or “school near home”) depends on the free-flow travel costs of the two networks. Locating the school “near workplace” is better than “near home” when the difference in the free-flow related costs for children between the two networks is not very large. Furthermore, we analyze the welfare effects of bottleneck expansion in the “school near workplace” network, finding that bottleneck expansion paradox may emerge when expanding the school-constrained bottleneck. Although properly designing the schedule gap can eliminate the paradox, a significant increase in the schedule gap may be needed to escape from the paradoxical cases when the common-constrained bottleneck capacity is slightly larger than the school-constrained bottleneck capacity. Our study sheds light on the importance of school locations in determining the performance of traffic management policies in the morning commute with both individual and household travelers.