On a Flexible Car Use Restriction Policy: Theory and Experiment

Car use restrictions have been adopted in some mega cities that experience rapid car ownership increase and worsening traffic congestion. Although easy to implement and considered fair, most implementations of this travel demand management policy do not offer travelers the flexibility to choose the days that they cannot use their cars. In this paper, we study a flexible car use restriction policy under which a private car cannot be driven on a certain day of a week, but the day can be chosen by its owner. Under this flexible policy, individuals face a dilemma between driving in congestion and traveling without a car, each incurring a cost of its own. The resulting equilibrium solutions under these two competing choices were derived, and a series of laboratory experiments were carried out to validate the theoretical results. The experimental results are found to be in agreement with the theoretical results. Moreover, our analysis shows that the flexible car use restriction policy reduces the average travel cost with a lesser increase in average driving cost when compared with the traditional car use restriction policy. Funding: Z.-Y. Gao was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71621001]. W.-X. Wang was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71631002]. R. Jiang was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71931002]. X.-Y. Sun was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71961002]. B.-Y. Zhang was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71922004 and 72131003]. X. Han was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71801011] and by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant 2018M631331]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2023.1200 .