Quantifying the phantom jam externality: The case of an Autobahn section in Germany

Kathrin Goldmann and Gernot Sieg

No 30, Working Papers from Institute of Transport Economics, University of Muenster

Abstract: When traffic demand is high, traffic jams can occur in the absence of bottlenecks or of demand peaks, simply because of the interaction between vehicle drivers on the road, a phenomenon called phantom jam. The probability of phantom jams occurring increases with traffic flow. Road users only consider their own time costs and not those of other drivers, so that an unpriced phantom jam externality leads to inefficient road usage. We offer a method for quantifying the phantom jam externality, and apply the method to a specific highway section in Germany. Congestion charges calculated ignoring phantom jam externalities may be as high as 50 percent too low.

Keywords: hypercongestion; congestion costs; stochastic capacity; phantom jams; external costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L91 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/ivm/sites/ivm/fil ... e/workingpaper30.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mut:wpaper:30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institute of Transport Economics, University of Muenster Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Birgit Rueschenschmidt ().