IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/uctcwp/qt9zx130zz.html

A Bathtub Model of Traffic Congestion

Author

Listed:
  • Arnott, Richard

Abstract

In the standard economic models of traffic congestion, traffic flow does not fall under heavily congested conditions. But this is counter to experience, especially in thedowntown areas of most major cities during rush hour. This paper presents a bathtub model of traffic congestion. The height of water in the bathtub corresponds totraffic density, velocity is negatively related to density, and outflow is the product of density and velocity. Above a critical density, outflow falls as density increases. The model indicates that, when demand is high relative to capacity, applying an optimal time-varying congestion tolls generates benefits that are considerably larger than those obtained from the standard models and exceed the toll revenue collected.

Suggested Citation

  • Arnott, Richard, 2011. "A Bathtub Model of Traffic Congestion," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt9zx130zz, University of California Transportation Center.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt9zx130zz
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/9zx130zz.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Henderson, J. Vernon, 1981. "The economics of staggered work hours," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 349-364, May.
    2. Ian W. H. Parry & Kenneth A. Small, 2005. "Does Britain or the United States Have the Right Gasoline Tax?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1276-1289, September.
    3. Daganzo, Carlos F. & Gayah, Vikash V. & Gonzales, Eric J., 2011. "Macroscopic relations of urban traffic variables: Bifurcations, multivaluedness and instability," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 278-288, January.
    4. Vickrey, William S, 1969. "Congestion Theory and Transport Investment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 59(2), pages 251-260, May.
    5. Small, Kenneth A, 1982. "The Scheduling of Consumer Activities: Work Trips," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 72(3), pages 467-479, June.
    6. Richard Arnott & Tilmann Rave & Ronnie Schöb, 2005. "Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262012197, December.
    7. Small, Kenneth A., 1992. "Using the Revenues from Congestion Pricing," University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers qt32p9m3mm, University of California Transportation Center.
    8. Arnott, Richard & Inci, Eren, 2006. "An integrated model of downtown parking and traffic congestion," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(3), pages 418-442, November.
    9. Arnott, Richard & de Palma, Andre & Lindsey, Robin, 1993. "A Structural Model of Peak-Period Congestion: A Traffic Bottleneck with Elastic Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(1), pages 161-179, March.
    10. Arnott, Richard & Inci, Eren, 2010. "The stability of downtown parking and traffic congestion," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 260-276, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fosgerau, Mogens & Small, Kenneth A., 2013. "Hypercongestion in downtown metropolis," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 122-134.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Arnott, Richard, 2013. "A bathtub model of downtown traffic congestion," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 110-121.
    2. Arnott, Richard, 2007. "Congestion tolling with agglomeration externalities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 187-203, September.
    3. John W Helsel & Venktesh Pandey & Stephen D. Boyles, 2020. "Time-Equitable Dynamic Tolling Scheme For Single Bottlenecks," Papers 2007.07091, arXiv.org.
    4. Kenneth Small, 2015. "The Bottleneck Model: An Assessment and Interpretation," Working Papers 141506, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics.
    5. Arnott, Richard & Shevyakhova, Elizaveta, 2014. "Tenancy rent control and credible commitment in maintenance," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 72-85.
    6. Knockaert, Jasper & Verhoef, Erik T. & Rouwendal, Jan, 2016. "Bottleneck congestion: Differentiating the coarse charge," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 59-73.
    7. Nicolas Coulombel & André de Palma, 2014. "The marginal social cost of travel time variability," Post-Print hal-01100105, HAL.
    8. Wilfredo Yushimito & Xuegang Ban & José Holguín-Veras, 2015. "Correcting the Market Failure in Work Trips with Work Rescheduling: An Analysis Using Bi-level Models for the Firm-workers Interplay," Networks and Spatial Economics, Springer, vol. 15(3), pages 883-915, September.
    9. Borger, Bruno De, 2011. "Optimal congestion taxes in a time allocation model," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 79-95, January.
    10. C. Robin Lindsey & Erik T. Verhoef, 1999. "Congestion Modelling," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 99-091/3, Tinbergen Institute.
    11. Fosgerau, Mogens & Small, Kenneth A., 2013. "Hypercongestion in downtown metropolis," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 122-134.
    12. Fosgerau, Mogens & de Palma, André, 2013. "The dynamics of urban traffic congestion and the price of parking," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 106-115.
    13. Nie, Yu (Marco) & Yin, Yafeng, 2013. "Managing rush hour travel choices with tradable credit scheme," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 1-19.
    14. Eva Gutiérrez-i-Puigarnau & Jos N. Van Ommeren, 2012. "Start Time and Worker Compensation Implications for Staggered-Hours Programmes," Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, University of Bath, vol. 46(2), pages 205-220, May.
    15. André de Palma & Mogens Fosgerau, 2010. "Dynamic and Static congestion models: A review," Working Papers hal-00539166, HAL.
    16. Verhoef, Erik T., 2020. "Optimal congestion pricing with diverging long-run and short-run scheduling preferences," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 191-209.
    17. Antonio Russo & Martin W. Adler & Federica Liberini & Jos N. van Ommeren, 2019. "Welfare Losses of Road Congestion," CESifo Working Paper Series 7693, CESifo.
    18. Long, Jiancheng & Szeto, W.Y., 2019. "Congestion and environmental toll schemes for the morning commute with heterogeneous users and parallel routes," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 305-333.
    19. Jin Cao & Monica Menendez & Rashid Waraich, 2019. "Impacts of the urban parking system on cruising traffic and policy development: the case of Zurich downtown area, Switzerland," Transportation, Springer, vol. 46(3), pages 883-908, June.
    20. Takayama, Yuki, 2015. "Bottleneck congestion and distribution of work start times: The economics of staggered work hours revisited," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 81(P3), pages 830-847.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt9zx130zz. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/itucbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.