Hypercongestion and road pricing in a continuous time/continuous place model of traffic congestion.

Author(s)
Verhoef, E.
Year
Abstract

This paper develops a continuous time - continuous place model of road traffic congestion, based on car-following theory. The model fully integrates two archetype representations of traffic congestion technology, namely "flow congestion" and "vertical queueing" models. Because a closed-form analytical solution of the formal model does not exist, its behaviour is explored in a numerical exercise. In a setting with endogenous departure time choice and with a bottleneck halfway along the route, it is shown that "hypercongestion" can arise as a dynamic "transitional and local" equilibrium phenomenon. Dynamic toll schedules are explored. It is found that a toll rule based on an intuitive dynamic and space-varying generalization of the standard Pigouvian tax rule can hardly be improved upon. A naive application of a toll schedule based on Vickrey's bottleneck model, in contrast, performs much worse and actually even reduces welfare. For the covering abstract see ITRD E124693.

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Publication

Library number
C 31882 (In: C 31766 CD-ROM) /71 /72 / ITRD E124809
Source

In: Proceedings of the European Transport Conference, Homerton College, Cambridge, 9-11 September 2002, 16 p.

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This publication is one of our other publications, and part of our extensive collection of road safety literature, that also includes the SWOV publications.