Traffic Allocation Mode of PPP Highway Project: A Risk Management Approach

Highway projects are the favorites of public-private partnership (PPP) investors because of their stable cash flow. However, there are high uncertainties in terms of traffic volume, resulting in unpredictable revenues, which has drawn major concern of PPP investors. For a road in a network, the traffic volume is determined by the traffic allocation rate, which is affected not only by the total traffic volume in the region but also by other traffic risk factors, such as travel time, toll rates, and travelling comfort. The conventional traffic allocation forecasting technique predominantly depends on the travel time, overlooking other risk factors. Consequently, traffic allocation forecasting is usually inaccurate. To improve the accuracy of traffic allocation forecasting in PPP road projects, this paper proposes to consider the effect of traffic risks together with traffic time by using the mean utility. Multinomial logit (MNL) model based on mean utility is used to predict the traffic allocation rate. To validate the proposed model, the system dynamic (SD) modeling is established to forecast the traffic volume of a case highway using the proposed traffic allocation forecasting model. The simulated result shows that the simulated traffic volume of past years from the proposed model is highly consistent with the actual one, evidencing that the proposed model can greatly improve the accuracy of the traffic forecasting.

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