Table Of ContentTransportation Research, Economics and Policy
Feng Xie • David M. Levinson
Evolving Transportation
Networks
1 C
Feng Xie David M. Levinson
Metropolitan Washington Council University of Minnesota
of Governments Department of Civil Engineering
Washington, D.C. 500 Pillsbury Drive SE
USA Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
[email protected] USA
[email protected]
Series Editors
David Gillen
Werner Rothengatter
ISSN 1572-4387
ISBN 978-1-4419-9803-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-9804-0
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-9804-0
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For Janet and our newborn son Eric.
FengXie
ForSamuel,Olivia,andBenjamin.
DavidLevinson
Preface
Ifirststartedthinkingsystematicallyabouttheevolutionoftransportationnetworks
intheearly1990swhenIwasatransportationplannerattheMontgomeryCounty
(Maryland) Planning Department working with the group developing a regional
travel demand forecasting model. My job involved developing a new generation
of travel demand forecasting models, predicting the number of trips coming into
andoutofeacharea,matchingtriporiginsanddestinations,determiningthemode
(car,transit,walking)theywoulduse,andassigningtherouteonthenetworkthey
would follow. These models originated in the 1950s in Chicago, and by the early
1990s had been deployed in all large US metropolitan areas. The model I worked
on,Travel/2wasdistinctinseveralways,mainlyensuringanequilibriumbetween
supplyanddemand(thetraveltimesusedtogeneratetraveldemand,andthetravel
times resulting from that demand). However, these models all took as a given the
underlying transportation network. If we could forecast traffic growth, and others
could forecast land use, why couldn’t we forecast the growth of networks? This
ideawasoneofthedriversformetoreturntograduateschoolforaPh.D.
AsIwaspreparingtoreturntograduateschoolin1994,Irememberaconversa-
tionIhadwithmyformercollegeroommateRobertForsythe,whowaslivingand
workinginnearbyVirginia.Iproposedthatthenetworkitself(notmerelythetravel
timesonthenetworkduetothedemand,butthephysicalcapacityofthenetwork)
responds in some fashion to demand. Like firms, links (segments of the network)
with more demand will grow. In the current political arrangement, the decision
about which links to expand appears to be made by a central authority. However,
itdoesnothavetobethatway,andmaybetheauthorityisjustrespondingtolocal
conditions.
I also was thinking about road pricing. It is well understood by transportation
economists,butalmostnooneelse,thattheonlyrealsolutiontocongestionispric-
ing:electronically(andwirelessly)collectingtollsfromcars,therebygivingtravel-
ersthepropersignalabouttheimpactoftheirtriponothertravelers.Supposethat
insteadofastatemonopolyonroads,theywereprivatelyownedandraisedrevenue
throughtolls.Whatwouldhappen?Wouldsocietybebetterorworseoff?
vii
viii Preface
I took those ideas with me to graduate school in Civil Engineering at the Uni-
versity of California at Berkeley, and when I was putting together my dissertation
prospectus, I proposed to study A Model of Road Pricing with Autonomous Links.
Networkswouldbecomprisedofindependentlinks,eachdecidingonapricingstrat-
egyandaninvestmentstrategy,givenalltheothersweredoingsoaswell.Eachlink
would charge tolls, and collect revenue proportional to the tolls. Each link would
chooseapricingstrategytomaximizeitsprofits,conditionedonotherlinksdoing
thesame.Ipreparedsomeanalyticalmodels,andproposedconstructingasimula-
tion framework to look at more complicated cases that could not be analyzed by
hand. This proposal did not consider capacity or investment, which it still took as
given,thoughtheintentwastorelaxthatassumption.
I proposed this to my committee at my Preliminary Oral Examination in 1996,
and in short, though I passed, the prospectus was given a major haircut. The oral
examinationcommittee,initsinfinitewisdom,thoughtthetopicwastooambitious.
Oneofthemembersofmydissertationcommitteesaid“Amonkeycandosimula-
tions”,whichmaybetrue,butamonkeycannotformulatesimulations,andIbelieve
simulationisanimportanttoolforunderstandinghowcomplexnetworkswork.
With the guidance of my advisor Mark Hansen, my dissertation was reshaped
intowhatitbecameOnWhomtheTollFalls,whichexaminedhistoricallyandana-
lyticallythequestionofwhetherjurisdictionschoosetaxesortolls(whichdepends
on the trade-off between raising revenue from non-residents (favoring tolls) and
transactioncosts(favoringtaxes).Thetitleindicatesitsconsiderationofequityand
incidence, and the comparison between tax and toll financing regimes. Taxes are
cheapertocollectthantolls,buttolls,particularlyboundarytolls,canraisemoney
fromnon-residentsmuchmoreeffectively.Thiswasultimatelypublishedasseveral
papersandarevisedversionwasrolledintothebookFinancingTransportationNet-
works (Levinson, 2002). Chapter 13 of this extends that dissertation’s research by
examining which level of government manages particular roads depending on the
transportationtechnology(thespeedoftravel)andthustheamountofcross-border
flows.
IlandedattheUniversityofMinnesotain1999,andpickinguptheideathathad
beensetaside,startedwritingproposalstoexaminethequestionofnetworkevolu-
tion.Inmysecondyearthere,Iwasabletoobtainfundingtoexaminethe“network
growthproblem”fromtheHumphreyInstitute’sSustainableTransportationApplied
Research(STAR)Initiative.TheSTARprogramfundedastudent,BhanuYerra,to
developthemodelsinhisMaster’sThesis,whichbecameseveralpapers:Yerraand
Levinson (2005); Levinson and Yerra (2006). The core essence of that research is
replicatedinChapter8,whichlaysthegroundworkforfurthersimulations.
Anotherproject,fundedbytheMinnesotaDepartmentofTransportation,exam-
ining the Twin Cities networks, If You Build It, Will They Come, supported the
Master’s Theses of two other students: Ramachandra Karamalaputi and Pavithra
Parthasarathi, and resulted in several more papers: Levinson and Karamalaputi
(2003a,b);Parthasarathietal.(2003).
TheresultsfromthesepaperswererolledintoaproposaltotheNationalScience
Foundation: CAREER: The Evolution of Transportation Networks: Empirical Re-
Preface ix
searchandAgent-BasedModels,whichwasfunded(onitsthirdsubmission)starting
in2003,andsupportedFengXie’sdissertationandmuchoftheresearchpresented
inthisvolume.
While suffering a fever at the Regional Science conference in San Juan Puerto
RicoinNovember2002,Idetailedtheideasforthesetofpapersthatbecamemyre-
searchagendafortheremainderofthedecade.Themodelsoutlinedthen(SOUND,
SONIC,SIGNAL)extendedtheSONGframeworkdescribedinBhanuYerra’sthe-
sis,whichwasbeingcompletedatthetime.
Otherfollow-upresearchincludedtheMnDOTgrantBeyondBusinessAsUsual:
EnsuringtheNetworkWeWantistheNetworkWeGet,whichfundedtheresearch
inChapter15(conductedwithNorahMontesdeOca).
Finally,IreceivedsupportfromtheUK’sEconomicandSocialResearchCouncil
tostudyTheCo-EvolutionofTransportNetworksandLandUse,whichresultedin
Chapters7,10,and12(thelastwithShanjiangZhu),aswellasotherrelatedpapers
(Levinson,2008a,b).
Myco-author,FengXie,engagedinthenetworkgrowthresearchuponarriving
intheUnitedStatesin2003.ThisresearchwashisMaster’sThesis,Ph.D.Disserta-
tion,andotherrelatedresearchconductedattheUniversityofMinnesota,forwhich
Iwastheadvisor.ExceptforChapter8,thisvolumeisbasicallyasynthesisofhis
thesisanddissertationchaptersandotherpiecesofnetworkgrowthstudieswehave
publishedinpeer-reviewedjournalsandconferenceproceedings.Withouthisexcel-
lenceandcommitmenttoscholarship,thisresearchwouldnothavebeennearlyas
successful.
Feng Xie’s original work added an important empirical dimension to the net-
workgrowthresearch.Heputasignificantamountofeffortsinextractinghistorical
dataandconductingretrospectiveexaminationofnetworkgrowthinempiricalcases
(Chapters4-7,Chapter4withMichaelCorbett).Findingsfromtheseempiricalanal-
ysesnotonlyprovidethecriticalevidencethatnetworkgrowthfollowsalogicaland
predictablepath,butalsoshedimportantlightonthesubsequentanalysisofgover-
nance,accessibility,topology,sequence,andlanduse/transportationinteractions.
While SONG (Chapter 8) can be thought of as proof of concept, demonstrat-
ingsometechniquesformodelingtheevolutionofthehierarchyofroadnetworks,
SOUND and SONIC (Chapters 9 and 10) reproduce the observed topological fea-
turesorsequenceoflinkdeployment.UsingSONIC/PFandSIGNAL(Chapters11
and12)weexploredtheco-developmentoftransportationnetworksandlandusein
simulation,whilecloselywatchingthesensitivityoftheresultingcollectivefeatures
ofnetworks/landusegradientsonmodelparameters.
Anotherimportantcontributionofhiswork,andthemainthemeofhisdisserta-
tion, is to explain how ownership affects network growth. Based on the empirical
findings (Chapters 4-6) that ownership is a critical factor of network growth and
thatdifferentownershipstructures(andthusdifferentobjectivefunctions)mayre-
sultindifferentcoursesofnetworkgrowth,Xieconstructedgame-theoreticmodels
inChapter13thatassociategovernancechoicewithspatialspilloversandnetwork
growth.Hisdissertationworkalsoevaluatedthedifferenceinevolutionbetweennet-
x Preface
works developed under different ownership structures in a controlled environment
(Chapter14).
Engaging in the application of empirically calibrated network growth models
to policy and planning studies, Feng Xie also developed a more realistic and so-
phisticatedrepresentationofnetworkgrowth.Onthedemandside,heimplemented
more realistic traffic assignment procedures (stochastic user equilibrium) in travel
demand forecasting (Chapter 12); on the supply side, he modeled the investment
and pricing policies of suppliers at different levels, considering the benefit, cost,
budget,prioritization,variabletolls,inter-jurisdictionalcollaboration,statedvs.re-
vealedinvestmentrules(Chapters14and15,thelatterwithNorahMontesdeOca),
etc.Inaddition,itishisoriginalworkthatusedaccessibilityasanorganizingcon-
cepttomodelsupply-demandinteractioninaholisticmodelframeworkofnetwork
growth.Thiseconomicframeworkfornetworkgrowthcenteredonaccessibilitydis-
tinguishesthislineofresearchfromthephysics-modelsthatdescribehownetworks
mightgrowwithoutexplainingwhy.
Other students in our Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems (Nexus) re-
search group working on related network growth projects not presented above in-
cludeLeiZhang,WeiChen,andWenlingChen.Thealumniandaffiliateresearchers
oftheNexusgroupcontributedinmanyways,andalldeserveacknowledgment.Re-
searchisintheendacollaborativeeffort.
DavidLevinson
Minneapolis
December2010
Acknowledgments
This book was written based on research work conducted within the project The
EvolutionofTransportationNetworks:EmpiricalResearchandAgent-BasedMod-
elsfundedbytheNationalScienceFoundation.
There are many people that have earned our gratitude for their contribution to
this book. We would especially like to thank Michael Corbett, who assembled the
Minneapolis skyway data used in Chapter 4, Bhanu Yerra, whose modeling work
on the self organization of surface transportation networks has formed the basis
ofChapter8,Shanjiang Zhu,whohashelpeduswiththe modelingworkreported
in Chapter 12, and Norah Montes de Oca, who has helped develop and calibrate
the network growth model presented in Chapter 15. We would also like to thank
Mr.JohnDiersforhisinvaluablesuggestionsonourstreetcarresearchpresentedin
Chapter6.
Bythetimethisbookiscompleted,someofitschaptershavebeenwrittenintoar-
ticlesandacceptedforpublicationatjournalsincludingJournalofEconomicGeog-
raphy,TransportationResearch,PublicChoice,NetworksandSpatialEconomics,
EnvironmentandPlanning,andComputers,Environment,andUrbanSystems.One
oftheotherchaptershasbeenincludedintheProceedingsofthe17thInternational
SymposiumonTransportationandTrafficTheory(ISTTT).Weextendthankstothe
editorsandanonymousreviewersfortheirinspiringcommentsandsuggestionson
ourresearch.
xi
Contents
PartI ANTECEDENTS
1 Introduction................................................... 3
2 Background ................................................... 7
2.1 Transportationgeography.................................... 9
2.2 Optimizationandnetworkdesign ............................. 10
2.3 Empiricalmodelsofnetworkgrowth .......................... 12
2.4 Economicsofnetworkgrowth................................ 13
2.4.1 Transportationeconomics ............................. 14
2.4.2 Urbaneconomics .................................... 14
2.4.3 Fiscalfederalism..................................... 15
2.4.4 Networkeffect ...................................... 15
2.4.5 Pathdependence..................................... 16
2.4.6 Coalitionformation .................................. 17
2.5 Networkscience ........................................... 17
2.6 Summaryanddiscussion .................................... 20
3 Framework.................................................... 25
3.1 Supply ................................................... 26
3.2 Demand .................................................. 27
3.3 Time ..................................................... 28
3.4 Space .................................................... 29
3.5 Summaryanddiscussion .................................... 29
PartII NETWORKGROWTHINTHEPAST
4 SkywaysinMinneapolis ........................................ 33
4.1 Introduction ............................................... 33
4.2 Methodology .............................................. 35
4.2.1 Accessibilityanalysis................................. 35
xiii
