Managing Bottleneck Congestion through Incentives on Electric Vehicle Charging and Lane Segmentation

Abstract

An incentive-based traffic demand management policy is proposed to alleviate traffic congestion on a road stretch that creates a bottleneck for the commuters. The incentive targets electric vehicles owners by proposing a discount on the energy price they use to charge their vehicles if they are flexible in their departure time. We propose dedicated lanes for electric vehicles to further reduce traffic congestion and to promote the usage of electric vehicles over fossil-fueled vehicles. We theoretically show the optimal road segmentation and compare this to scenarios with and without incentive-based electric vehicle charging. We support our theoretical findings with numerical simulations that allow us to highlight the power of the proposed methods and to provide practical advice for the design of policies.