Building roads with dynamic pricing to address congestion in Beirut, Lebanon

Abstract

Surrounded by mountains to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Lebanon has a narrow coastal plain which is 225 kilometers (139.8 miles) long. Beirut, the capital, is located in the center of the north-south coastline. Home to approximately one third of the total country’s population, the greater Beirut area is plagued by extended hours of congestion. Similar to other major metropolitan cities, traffic congestion in Beirut causes millions of dollars of lost productivity, wasted fuel, increased air pollution and hours of delay. Construction costs, limited ROW, environmental constraints and societal concerns are some factors making the addition of new lanes along the only north-south principal arterial, Highway A1, extremely difficult. As a result, a value-priced (or congestion-priced) reversible elevated (due to ROW limitations) facility would serve as an integrated solution for the congestion problem. A model of a 10 Kilometer (6.25 miles) most congested section of Highway A1, between the Tabarja interchange and Nahr El Kalb interchange, is used to simulate demand on the general purpose and the congestion priced lanes. The concepts addressed in this paper include the operational and design issues associated with the elevated reversible lanes, the simulation tools used to analyze operations of the proposed facility, demand estimation and the needed dynamic tolling strategies, and the evaluation of benefits to costs of the proposed facility.