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Verhoef, E. (2003). Inside the queue: hypercongestion and road pricing in a continuous time - continuous place model of traffic congestion Journal of Urban Economics, 54:531--565.


  • Journal
    Journal of Urban Economics

This paper develops a continuous-time-continuous-place dynamic economic model of traffic congestion, based on car-following theory. The model integrates two archetype congestion technologies used in the economics literature: 'static flow congestion' and 'dynamic bottleneck congestion.' With endogenous departure times and a bottleneck along the route, 'hypercongestion' arises as a dynamic equilibrium phenomenon on the upstream road segment. Congestion tolls based on an intuitive dynamic and space-varying generalization of the standard Pigouvian tax rule can hardly be improved upon. A naïve application of a toll schedule based on Vickrey's bottleneck model performs much worse and reduces welfare in the numerical model. {\textcopyright} 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.