Modeling and evaluating FAIR highway performance and policy options

•It is the first to model the concept of Fast and Intertwined Regular (FAIR) highway;•A bilevel programming model describes the interactions of FAIR operators and users;•Credit policy is explicitly modeled considering the heterogeneous users;•FAIR highway imposes less financial burden on the low-income commuters.•Subsidizing low-income commuters increases the overall toll level of FAIR highway.

Fast and Intertwined Regular (FAIR) highway had been proposed as a road pricing concept that distributes credits to the low-income commuters. The paper models the FAIR highway operations considering the heterogeneity of commuters and lane-by-lane variations. A bilevel programming framework is established to concurrently model the FAIR operator’s pricing strategies (at the upper level) and commuters’ mode and lane choices (at the lower level). Various operation policy scenarios are designed and tested to evaluate the FAIR highway performance on an experimental highway corridor. A series of sensitivity analyses are conducted with respect to the key conditional factors such as travel demand levels and lane-by-lane variations. Numerical results show that compared to the do-nothing case the FAIR scheme can significantly alleviate the traffic congestion and promote the use of high-occupancy vehicles. The FAIR highway, however, has two potential disadvantages: (i) the toll level is increased when subsidizing the low-income commuters and (ii) the divergence of lane utilization is aggravated on the FAIR highways compared to the do-nothing case. The study provides insights for the decision-makers and practitioners on the potential outcomes of a FAIR highway application.