Distributive Perimetral Queue Balancing Mechanisms: Towards Equitable Urban Traffic Gating and Fair Perimeter Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces queue balancing mechanisms for perimeter control in urban traffic management, aiming to improve fairness across entry points without sacrificing efficiency, demonstrated through a case study of San Francisco's Financial District.

Contribution

It integrates fairness objectives into perimeter control design using explicit queue balancing, enhancing equity in traffic gating while maintaining system performance.

Findings

Queue balancing strategies improve fairness metrics in heterogeneous demand scenarios.

Conventional perimeter control reduces delays and can also enhance fairness.

The framework supports equitable control in intelligent transportation systems.

Abstract

Perimeter control is an effective urban traffic management strategy that regulates inflow to congested urban regions using aggregate network dynamics. While existing approaches primarily optimize system-level efficiency, such as total travel time or network throughput, they often overlook equity considerations, leading to uneven delay distributions across entry points. This work integrates fairness objectives into perimeter control design through explicit queue balancing mechanisms.A large-scale, microscopic case study of the Financial District in the San Francisco urban network is used to evaluate both performance and implementation challenges. The results demonstrate conventional perimeter control not only reduces total and internal delays but can also improve fairness metrics (Harsanyian, Rawlsian, Utilitarian, Egalitarian). Building on this observation, queue balancing strategies match conventional performance while yielding measurable fairness improvements, especially in heterogeneous demand scenarios, where congestion is unevenly distributed across entry points. The proposed framework contributes toward equitable control design for emerging intelligent transportation systems and higher user acceptance for those.