Measuring Marginal Congestion Costs of Urban Transportation: Do Networks Matter?

Elena Safirova and Kenneth Gillingham

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: In determining the marginal cost of congestion, economists have traditionally relied upon directly measuring traffic congestion on network links, disregarding any “network effects,” since the latter are difficult to estimate. While for simple networks the comparison can be done within a theoretical framework, it is important to know whether such network effects in real large-scale networks are quantitatively significant. In this paper we use a strategic transportation planning model (START) to compare marginal congestion costs computed link-by-link with measures taking into account network effects. We find that while in aggregate network effects are not significant, congestion measured on a single link is a poor predictor of total congestion costs imposed by travel on that link. Also, we analyze the congestion proliferation effect on the network to see how congestion is distributed within an urban area.

Keywords: marginal congestion costs; congestion pricing; urban networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R41 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-net and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-03-56.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-03-56.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-03-56.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring marginal congestion costs of urban transportation: Do networks matter? (2007)
Working Paper: Measuring Marginal Congestion Costs of Urban Transportation: Do Networks Matter? (2003)
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:rff:dpaper:dp-03-56

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Resources for the Future ().