Raith, Andrea

Understanding the impact of incentives for electric vehicles with an integrated mode choice and traffic assignment model

Bob Grün and Andrea Raith

Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland

The drastic increase in the emissions of carbon dioxide is one of the major contributors to global warming. A large amount of the overall carbon dioxide emissions is caused by the transport sector. Depending on their speed, petrol-based vehicles produce more than 50 times more carbon dioxide than electric vehicles. The slower the speed is, the larger is this difference. Since daily commuting within larger cities often means travelling in congested road networks, an increase of electric vehicles could contribute to a reduction of carbon dioxide. For this reason, we consider different approaches to increase the general uptake of electric vehicles.

We present an integrated mode choice and traffic assignment approach for petrol based and electric vehicles and comment on existence and uniqueness of its solution. In two case studies, one for a motorway section and one for central Auckland (New Zealand), we consider different incentives for electric vehicle uptake and compare the resulting traffic flow as well as overall travel time and emissions. Since the resulting number of electric vehicles depends on the cost of the car and the users’ value of time, we conclude the case studies with a sensitivity analysis on the input data.