According to the Cost Recovery Theorem the revenues from optimal congestion tolls pay for the capacity costs of an optimal-sized facility if capacity is perfectly divisible, and if user costs and capacity costs have constant scale economies. This paper extends the theorem to long-run uncertainty...

This paper reviews literature on the optimal design of pricing policies to reduce urban automobile congestion. The implications of a range of complicating factors are considered; these include traffic bottlenecks, constraints on which roads and freeway lanes in the road network can be priced,...

In most dynamic traffic congestion models, congestion tolls must vary continuously over time to achieve the full optimum. This is also the case in Vickrey (1969) ‘bottleneck model’. To date, the closest approximations of this ideal in practice have so-called ‘step tolls’, in which the...

This paper analyses the efficiency and distributional impacts of congestion pricing in Vickrey's (1969) dynamic bottleneck model of congestion, allowing for continuous distributions of values of time and schedule delay. We find that congestion pricing can leave a majority of travellers better...

This paper analyzes the possibilities to relieve traffic congestion using subsidies instead of Pigouvian taxes, as well as revenue-neutral combinations of rewards and taxes (‘feebates’). The model considers a Vickrey–ADL model of bottleneck congestion with endogenous scheduling. With...

We consider price and service-quality setting in oligopolistic markets for congestible services, applied to the case of private roads. Previous studies show that parallel competitors set a volume/capacity ratio (and thereby a travel time or service quality) that is socially optimal if they take...

Starting in January 2025, New York City became the first city in the United States to introduce a fee for vehicles entering its central business district (CBD). Using Google Maps Traffic Trends, we show that the policy increased speeds in the CBD, had spillovers onto non-CBD roads, and reduced...

Public transit accounts for only 1% of U.S. passenger miles traveled but nevertheless attracts strong public support. Using a simple choice model, we predict that transit riders are likely to be individuals who commute along routes with the most severe roadway delays. These individuals' choices...

There is limited knowledge about the valuation of reduced transport time variability for freight transports. This paper analyses a Swedish grocery company’s transports by shuttle train, as a case study. The distribution of the train arrival time is analyzed; it is shown that the 10 per cent...

In the last five decades, much of the focus on travel cost has been on what form pricing should take, whether it should be a direct road toll, in the form a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax, encapsulated in the gas tax, or by some other mechanism. An area that has received much less attention,...