The impact of road pricing on travel time variability under elastic demand

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of road pricing for the bottleneck model with endogenous random delay. We extend the widely used scheduling model by integrating trip scheduling, endogenous traffic congestion, travel time variability (TTV), and road pricing into one modeling framework to analyze the role of road pricing in addressing TTV. This paper investigates the departure profiles and examines the social surplus under TTV and derives analytical results to illustrate properties of the model. It demonstrates the impact of road pricing and TTV on the departure profile of travelers and the system performance. For travelers, the presence of TTV leads to a smooth departure profile, hence a reduction in queuing cost. As for the system, TTV reduces the social surplus. This study shows that road pricing can be used to compensate or mitigate the social surplus loss due to TTV.