Analysis of Urban Car Owners Commute Mode Choice
Based on Evolutionary Game Model
Huawei Gong and Wenzhou Jin
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jcse/2015/291363/abs/
Summary:
As major cities develop in China and access to privately
owned cars is increasingly possible the infrastructure is struggling to keep
up. Traffic congestion is becoming a
larger issue with the increasing affluence of the Chinese people making the
ownership of a family car within reach for many. One method of dealing with the inconvenience
of driving a private vehicle on a crowded roadway is public
transportation. For the purposes of this
study public transportation is synonymous with buses.
The idea behind this paper is that Chinese citizens will
have to choose between driving a privately owned car and taking the bus as a
form of public transportation. This is
used to formulate a two-level game model.
The public facilities of the roads have the characteristics of nonexcludablity
and nonrivalry, this means that rational actors will take full advantage of
them as long as they can by driving their own cars. According to the authors this situation is
known as a “public facilities tragedy”, to avoid this the government must take
action. The authors believe that the
government must control the increase in the number of cars and the usage of
private cars; at the same time the government should encourage the use of
public transportation.
For this analysis the authors assumed that in the future car
owners would give up driving and commute by public transit as urban public
transportation becomes more developed.
They then define group A as a low income group and group B as a higher
income group. Group A is more likely to
choose public transportation over a private car because it is more cost
effective, while group B is more likely to utilize a private car even if it
costs more.
The authors conclude that based on their analysis, the
choice of how to commute is mainly affected by the factors of travel time,
travel cost, and comfort level, and so forth.
The choice is influenced by public transportation system development and
by private travel restrictions put in place by the government.
Critique:
This article takes a relatively simple idea for a game
theory model and makes the explanation far more complicated than it needed to
be. Part of the difficulty may arise from
English not being the primary language of the authors. There were times in the article that words
were unnecessarily vague and the logic could be difficult to follow as a
result. The authors do admit that the
payoff matrix is only an assumption of the ideal situation and that further
study would allow them to come up with more refined and accurate results. As it stands the conclusions they came to
based on the results were pretty broad.
Posts
Do you believe that the payoff matrix produces 'broad results.' Can you go into a little more detail about the payoff matrix or is this too irrelevant to understanding their results?
ReplyDeleteTheir process was a bit difficult to follow, but if I understood correctly they more or less used placeholder values for the payoff matrix I posted above. This means that the authors didn't really conduct an analysis based on real world data, rather they used their estimates with the desire to use real data in the future.
DeleteThis study is intriguing, if not well done, in how results would compare if a similar study was done in America. While public transportation is common in the biggest cities, traffic congestion from private vehicles is still a major issue. A study implementing game theory could potentially help public officials increase 'payoffs' for citizens opting to use public transportation and therefore reduce congestion.
ReplyDeleteThe article referenced several other studies of a similar nature that I did not have time to look into. I would be very interested to see the idea of this research conducted in a more rigorous manner.
DeleteI think this study had good intentions in trying to help the transportation problem in China. I wondered though that maybe the authors assumed too much by supposing that car owners would give up driving and commute by public transit even if public transportation becomes more developed. It seems possible that those who afford cars see them as a luxury that they would not choose to give up. Did the authors elaborate on this assumption anymore?
ReplyDeleteThe authors broke the population down into two different groups based on income. They assumed that the higher income group would be more reluctant to give up their cars compared to the lower income group which might be more easily swayed by economic incentives.
DeleteLike you and others, I too question the study. It just appears like in this scenario that game theory is not the best. Maybe with a different structure it would be a better study but it doesn't appear to strongly grasp the main points of game theory.
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to comment on some things mentioned in the article based on my own experience and those of people I met in China. Although people may be earning more due to a growing economy, city living is not cheap and hard to find forcing people to move to the outskirts of the city where public transportation is less available and desperately needed. For those who can afford a car, they might buy it as a status symbol. The Chinese government (at least in Beijing) tries to influence people away from purchasing cars by restricting the days a week they can drive and imposing heavy taxes because of air pollution. I personally saw Chinese transportation as more convenient and cleaner than in the US, the only caveat being overcrowding. I liked this article because it helped me visualize game theory easier however I was let down by the authors' oversimplification of the traffic problem in China's big cities.
ReplyDelete