Towards Fair Roads -- Manifesto For Fairness Paradigm in Traffic Engineering

Kevin Riehl, Anastasios Kouvelas and Michail Makridis

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Traffic engineering aims to control infrastructure and population behaviour to achieve optimal usage of road networks. Fairness is fundamental to stimulate cooperation in large populations, and plays an important role in traffic engineering, as it increases the well-being of users, improves driving safety by rule-adherence, and overcomes public resistance at legislative implementation. Despite the importance of fairness, only a few works have translated fairness into the transportation domain, with a focus on transportation planning rather than traffic engineering. Moreover, existing works in traffic engineering discuss fairness superficially and insufficiently, focussing on only a few definitions. The mission of this work is (i) to challenge the efficiency-driven engineering paradigm of traffic engineering, (ii) to establish a link to modern fairness theories, and (iii) to highlight the importance of fairness when allocating scarce, public good, mobility resources between road users. To achieve this, a mode-agnostic, distributive fairness framework for mobility resource allocation is proposed. It serves when designing traffic engineering solutions, and convinces in public debates with a useful, argumentative tool-set to confront equity considerations. Ultimately, this enables systematic research and design of fairness-informed control systems, demonstrated by three case studies on signalized intersection management and static road pricing.

Date: 2024-08, Revised 2025-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.01309 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2408.01309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().