Research on Demand Price Elasticity Based on Expressway ETC Data: A Case Study of Shanghai, China

The research on price elasticity of demand, especially in the field of transportation, has high theoretical and application value. Based on the perspective of price elasticity of demand, the study presents the impact of adjusting expressway rates on the traffic flow of cars with seven seats or less. The data are from the measured data of the Shanghai expressway Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) from 2019 to 2020. In order to eliminate the impact of the surge of ETC users in 2019 on the results, Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is used to optimize the data. The research shows that the price elasticity of demand will increase with the increase in charge amount (distance).