Road Pricing under Travel Time Variability

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of road pricing for the bottleneck model with endogenous random delay. We extend the widely used scheduling model by integrating trip scheduling, endogenous traffic congestion, travel time variability (TTV), and road pricing into one modeling framework to analyze the role of road pricing in addressing TTV. This paper examines the social economic benefits under TTV, defines the value of travel time variability accordingly, and derives analytical results to illustrate properties of the model, including the impact of road pricing and TTV on travelers and the system performance. For travelers, the presence of TTV leads to spreading in their departure profile, hence reduction in queuing cost, at the expense of increases in scheduling cost and random delay cost. As for the system, TTV reduces the social surplus. This study shows that road pricing can be used as a means to compensate or mitigate the social surplus loss due to TTV.