Solving Traffic Congestion from the Demand Side

As intercity traffic is becoming faster with an increasing mileage of motorways and high-speed railways, urban traffic is becoming slower, which causes additional costs to the global economy, risen transport costs, increased fuel consumption and deteriorating transport pollution. Worsening urban congestion is the result of many factors, including increased travel demand for intensified economic and leisure activities and growing population. After many decades of experience in traffic and transportation engineering, it has become widely acknowledged that strategies to manage demand are more important to transport operations than strategies to increase capacity (supply) of facilities and that better use needs to be made of existing and new transport infrastructure. The inability to easily and quickly add new or expand the existing infrastructure in keeping up with the growth in passenger and freight transport has resulted in the need to pay more attention to Travel Demand Management (TDM). The concepts of TDM are rooted in efforts of the 1970s and 1980s and aimed at offering alternatives to single occupancy commuter travel for the sake of energy savings, environmental improvement and conABSTRACT