Congestion behavior and tolling strategies in a bottleneck model with exponential scheduling preference

Abstract

The bottleneck model has been widely used in the past fifty years to analyze the morning commute. To reduce the complexity of analysis, most previous studies adopted discontinuous scheduling preference (DSP). However, this handling destroys the continuity in departure rate and differentiability in travel time and cumulative departures. This paper considers an exponential scheduling preference (ESP), which supposes the unit schedule delay cost for commuters exponentially changes with time. With this scheduling preference, we analytically derive solutions and economic properties of user equilibrium and social optimum in the bottleneck model. The first-best, time-varying toll and the optimal single-step toll scheme with ESP are also studied. Results indicate that ESP eliminates the discontinuity in departure rate and non-differentiability in travel time and cumulative departures, which makes the process of morning commute smooth. The ignorance of ESP will lead to underestimation in the queueing time and bias in travel behavior analysis and policymaking.

Keywords

• the bottleneck model
• traffic congestion
• exponential scheduling preference
• user equilibrium
• social optimum