Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to propose a model to predict the departure time choice of commuters by private cars responding to road traffic congestion. The model is based on an assumption that commuters choose their departure times to minimize the sum of disutility derived from “Virtual Time Consumption” (time interval from departure time to work start time) and that due to traffic congestion. The disutility due to traffic congestion is defined as a function of the reciprocal of travel speed in the measure of VTC. The model was applied to commuters for a factory and it was revealed that the proposed model gave reasonable estimation of departure time distributions.
