The Bottleneck Model: An Assessment and Interpretation

Kenneth Small ()
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Kenneth Small: Department of Economics, University of California-Irvine

No 141506, Working Papers from University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics

Abstract: The bottleneck model of congestion with endogenous scheduling has become a standard tool of transportation economics. It provides surprising insights about the time pattern of congestion, optimal pricing, and many distinct inefficiencies of unpriced equilibria including wrong departure order with heterogeneous preferences, wrong allocation of users across links of a network, and wrong order in which parking spaces are occupied. It illuminates the roles of travel-time reliability, traffic information, and extreme congestion ("hypercongestion"). It has been developed for use in practical network planning. Future use will probably emphasize greater realism, leading to more practical applications.

Keywords: Congestion; Bottleneck; Scheduling; Congestion pricing; Parking; Reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R41 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

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