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back to Carlos Daganzo's Publications PageThis research shows that certain time-dependent congestion reduction schemes involving tolls have the potential for benefiting every driver even if the collected revenues are not returned to the payers. The paper considers a population of commuters tha t have to use a single bottleneck during the rush hour in order to arrive at work on time. It is assumed that the number of commuters is fixed (independent of the control strategy) and that each commuter wishes to pass through the bottleneck at a given ti me, which may differ across commuters. Commuters are otherwise identical. Each of them chooses his/her arrival time at the bottleneck so as to minimize a linear combination of monetary cost (tolls), queuing time and deviation from the desired passage time . A time-dependent toll is applied during a time window, but some commuters are exempted from paying it. Every day each commuter is classified as either 'free" or "paying." The classification method is such that: (i) in the long-run the fraction of days, f, that a commuter is free is the same for all commuters, and (ii) the fraction of "free" commuters is f every day. "Free" commuters are allowed to use the bottleneck without paying the toll, while "paying" commuters can avoid the toll only if they pass t hrough the bottleneck outside the time window. It is shown that if commuters wish to pass through the bottleneck close together then the toll, the window and the fraction of free commuters can be chosen in a way that will benefit everyone by inducing an e quilibrium where the '"peak is smoothed out" in a particular way. Up to 25% of the queues can be eliminated in this way.
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back to Carlos Daganzo's Publications Page