Road Congestion and Incident Duration

Martin W. Adler, Jos van Ommeren () and Piet Rietveld
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Martin W. Adler: VU University Amsterdam

No 13-089/VIII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

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 0.40 implying that a one minute duration reduction generates a €60 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 €500 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)
JEL-codes: R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Journal Article: Road congestion and incident duration (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20130089

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