The Importance of Being Early

Pavithra Parthasarathi (), Anupam Srivastava (), Nikolas Geroliminis () and David Levinson

No 201103, Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group

Abstract: The assumption that the penalty for being early is less than that for being late was put forward by Vickrey (1963) who analyzed how commuters compare penalties in the form of schedule delay (due to peak hour congestion), against penalties in the form of reaching their destination (ahead or behind their desired time of arrival). This assumption has been tested by many researchers since then for various applications, especially in modeling congestion pricing (Arnott et al., 1990) where it is critical to understand the tradeoff between schedule delay and travel delay. Key findings are summarized in the second section of this paper. This research aims to test this hypothesis of earliness being less expensive than lateness using empirical data at different levels and across different regions. New methods to estimate the ratio of earliness to lateness for different types of datasets are developed, which could be used by agencies to implement control policies like congestion pricing or other schemes more accurately. Travel survey data from metropolitan areas provide individual travel patterns while loop detector data provide link level traffic flow data.

Keywords: Schedule Delay; Travel Time; Traffic; Travel Behavior. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 J22 R41 R42 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Transportation 38(2) pp. 227-247.

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/180009 First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The importance of being early (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nex:wpaper:importanceofbeingearly

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