How to Design Effective Road Pricing Cordons

This paper describes three approaches to cordon location design, a judgemental approach, an optimisation approach based on Genetic Algorithms and a short-cut approach which lies between the two. The GA optimal single cordon generated benefits 80% higher than the best judgmental cordon for a simplified network of Edinburgh. The short cut approach was developed from an observation that charging on only a few of the highest marginal cost links could result in a high proportion of the system optimum or first best benefits. Initial results for Edinburgh and York have shown that the approach can double benefits compared to a judgemental cordon and more impressively achieve 93% of the GA optimal cordon benefits with only a few model runs in the case of Edinburgh.