Project description

This paper uses the Vickrey (1969) bottleneck model to empirically measure the social cost of traffic congestion in the US. We estimate extra travel time over and above hypothetical free-flow travel time, which we call "queuing time", for each average commute trip. Our estimate implies that the annual social cost of congestion borne by all US commuters is 24 billion dollars. A higher level of congestion in a city may be attributed to a smaller per capita road stock in the city. This paper also empirically quantifies the optimal toll depending both on the commuter's arrival time and residential location.