Inframarginal Travelers and Transportation Policy
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Series
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Speaker(s)Jonathan D. Hall (University of Toronto, Canada)
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FieldSpatial Economics
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LocationOnline
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Date and time
March 11, 2021
14:00 - 15:00
If you are interested in joining the seminar, please send an email to Daniel Haerle or Sacha den Nijs.
Abstract: Half of all travelers have such inflexible
schedules that they strictly prefer their ex-ante arrival times to all others;
however, existing models of traffic congestion implicitly assume that no such
inframarginal travelers exist. This leads these models to predict travel times
nearly seven times greater than those observed. Accounting for these travelers
significantly improves these models’ ability to fit the data and changes policy
prescriptions. In the case of congestion pricing, it reduces the socially
optimal road toll by up to 72%.