Rerouting drivers from selfish route choices to system-optimal traffic patterns has the potential to improve the performance of existing infrastructure. Previous research has looked into assessing the potential of rerouting through the empirical price of anarchy, a measure of network efficiency. However, studies using real-world measurements have been limited by methodological accuracy and network size. Also, they have lacked understanding of the spatial distribution of benefits from rerouting and the relationship with marginal external cost road charges that can be used for implementation. In this article, we create an accurate data-driven traffic assignment model of England's Strategic Road Network. We use it to calculate the national price of anarchy, which is found to be almost 1 implying gains from rerouting at the national scale are minimal and smaller than in other studies. The results show the distribution of rerouting benefits varies strongly with different network zones and demand profiles. This did not match the distribution of marginal external cost charges. Some zones have noticeable benefits from rerouting although the overall network benefit is small, however, these zones do not coincide with where the largest road charges have to be applied for system-optimal rerouting. These results have implications for rerouting implementation.@en

The ability to build accurate traffic assignment models on large-scale major road networks is essential for effective infrastructure planning. Static traffic assignment models often utilize standard formulations of congestion functions which suffer from various inaccuracies. Conversely, newer approaches in the literature rely on inverse optimisation to provide enhanced accuracy but incur significantly heavy computational costs. The work in this article develops density-based congestion function fitting in order to compute traffic assignment patterns. Computational efficiency makes the method amenable to be used on real-world networks at national scale. The methodology is applied on the motorway network connecting the primary metropolitan areas in England using Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling system data. The results demonstrate that the use of density-based congestion functions provides significant improvement in terms of computational runtime in the order of 11,000 times (22 secs vs 68 hours). Correspondingly, prediction error from this method (3.9 to 6.9% for time prediction and 10.4 to 10.7% for flow prediction) slightly outperforms the state-of-the-art Inv-Opt method (5.3 to 8.8% for time prediction and 10.5 to 11% for flow prediction). The increased accuracy provides greater confidence in modelling results for applications such as cost-benefit analysis and price of anarchy calculations.@en

Accurate static traffic assignment models are important tools for the assessment of strategic transportation policies. In this article we present a novel approach to partition road networks through network modularity to produce data-driven static traffic assignment models from loop detector data on large road systems. The use of partitioning allows the estimation of the key model input of Origin–Destination demand matrices from flow counts alone. Previous network tomography-based demand estimation techniques have been limited by the network size. The amount of partitioning changes the Origin–Destination estimation optimisation problems to different levels of computational difficulty. Different approaches to utilising the partitioning were tested, one which degenerated the road network to the scale of the partitions and others which left the network intact. Applied to a subnetwork of England’s Strategic Road Network and other test networks, our results for the degenerate case showed flow and travel time errors are reasonable with a small amount of degeneration. The results for the non-degenerate cases showed that similar errors in model prediction with lower computation requirements can be obtained when using large partitions compared with the non-partitioned case. This work could be used to improve the effectiveness of national road systems planning and infrastructure models. @en