Traffic congestion is a classic externality, especially pervasive in urban areas. The theoretical and empirical relationships governing it have been thoroughly studied. As a result, most urban economists and a growing number of other policy analysts agree that the best policy to deal with it...

This paper reports results from evaluations of two recent road pricing demonstrations in Southern California. These demonstration projects provide particularly useful opportunities for measuring commuters’ values of time and reliability. Unlike most revealed preference studies of value of...

Basic to several key issues in current urban economic theory and public policy is a presumption that local imbalances between employment and residential sites strongly influence people's commuting patterns. We examine this presumption by finding the commuting pattern for the Los Angeles region...

Driven by problems of traffic congestion, U.S. policy toward urban highways has lurched over several decades from highway building to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes to travel demand management. Yet congestion has worsened, and there is scant evidence that these policies have had any appreciable...

The economic theory behind congestion pricing relies on using the revenues to help compensate highway users. But can practical methods of using revenues come close to achieving this compensation, and still have salient appeal to important political groups? This paper investigates the...

The standard economic model for analyzing traffic congestion, due to A.A. Walters, incorporates a relationship between speed and traffic flow. Empirical measurements indicate a region, known as hypercongestion, in which speed increases with flow. We argue that this relationship is unsuitable as...

A debate over the empirical underpinnings of urban economic models is emerging under the unlikely rubric of "wasteful commuting." Hamilton (1982) shows that a commonly used monocentric model, in which employment and population densities decline exponentially from a center, greatly underpredicts...