Abstract
This paper generalises the model of bottleneck congestion such that formation and development of traffic jams is explicitly formulated. The model is applied to the peak-load problem for the morning rush hour: every morning, a fixed number of commuters travels across a roadway, and each of them chooses departure time to minimise commuting cost consisting of travel time cost, scheduling cost, and toll. Equilibrium and optimal patterns of departure are solved and optimal peak-load toll is derived. Incorporating traffic jams alters the earlier results in the literature. That is, road users may be better off from paying the optimal peak-load toll. Conditions under which such a result obtained are identified by simulations. (A)