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This article proposes a novel urban system equilibrium model for design of a tradable location tax credit scheme to balance traffic congestion and environmental externalities. In the proposed model, the interaction between the location tax credit scheme and households' residential location choices is explicitly considered. It is assumed that the authority initially allocates the credits to all households in a uniform way, and the households pay a certain amount of credits for housing consumptions, relying on the traffic congestion and environmental externalities that they cause. The credits are traded among households through a free market, and the tax revenue due to credit trading is considered as a part of household's income to be redistributed through household's income budget constraint. For a given credit scheme, households' residential location choices and housing market structure in terms of housing prices and space can be endogenously determined by the urban system equilibrium and the price per unit of credit is governed by the credit market equilibrium. A social welfare maximization model is presented to determine the total amount of credits issued. The results show that implementation of the tradable location tax credit scheme can rationalize the urban residential density and promote the efficiency of the urban system in terms of social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing concerns about environmental and energy issues in many large Chinese cities, local authorities are introducing public bicycle schemes to promote the use of green transportation modes. This paper proposes a novel model for investigating the effects of the public bicycle schemes in a congested multi-modal road network with auto, bus, and public bicycle travel. The decision-making process of travelers regarding travel modes and route choices is assumed to follow a hierarchical choice structure. The effects of pollution emissions by motorized vehicles (i.e., autos and buses), crowding discomfort in buses, and riding fatigue on bicycles are considered in the proposed model. The multi-modal travel choice equilibrium problem is formulated as an equivalent variational inequality problem. The existence and uniqueness of the solution of the proposed model are examined. A heuristic solution algorithm that combines a diagonalization approach and the method of successive averages is adapted to solve the proposed model. A numerical example is given to illustrate the application of the proposed model and solution algorithm. Findings are reported on the effects of the public bicycle schemes and emission tax policy on the multi-modal transportation system. The optimal public bicycle rental price and emission tax for maximization of social welfare can also be determined by the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]