Road congestion and incident duration

Martin W. Adler, Jos van Ommeren () and Piet Rietveld

Economics of Transportation, 2013, vol. 2, issue 4, 109-118

Abstract: Non-recurrent congestion is frequently caused by accidents and other incidents. We estimate the causal effect of incident duration on drivers' time losses through changes in non-recurrent road congestion on Dutch highways. We demonstrate that incident duration has a strong positive, but concave, effect on non-recurrent congestion. The duration elasticity of non-recurrent congestion is about 0.35 implying that a one minute duration reduction generates a €57 gain per incident. We also show that at locations with high levels of recurrent congestion, non-recurrent congestion levels are considerably higher. At very congested locations, the benefit of reducing the incident duration by one minute is about €1200 per incident. Public policies that prioritize duration reductions at congested locations are therefore more beneficial.

Keywords: Congestion; Vehicle-loss-hours; Incident duration; Accidents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecotra:v:2:y:2013:i:4:p:109-118

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecotra.2013.12.003

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