TRADABLE TIME-OF-DAY BOTTLENECK PERMITS FOR MORNING COMMUTERS

Abstract

This paper presents a novel transportation demand management scheme that can completely eliminate traffic jam at a bottleneck. In the proposed scheme, a road manager issues “bottleneck permits” that allow road users to pass a pre-specified bottleneck at a pre-specified time, and they are traded (and priced) among road users in auction markets. We then prove that the introduction of the proposed system in morning rush-hour not only eliminates traffic jam but also can achieve Pareto optimality in equilibrium. Through this analysis, we reveal that the equilibrium problem of the proposed system is mathematically isomorphic to an equilibrium model of urban residential location.