Abstract
Given the limitations of new urban railway construction in the Tokyo metropolitan area, a time-varying fare policy is expected to be one of the most effective measures to spread the concentrated peak demand. This paper presents an empirical study that examined the theoretical time-varying marginal utility model introduced by Vickrey (1973), using data on urban rail commuters in Tokyo. Then, the departure-time-choice model, under deterministic user equilibrium, was proposed by integration with the empirically identified time-varying marginal utility model. The outputs of the equilibrium model were compared with the results from the traditional constant marginal utility model; our results indicated that the former outputs would be more suitable for a commuting pattern with longer travel distance, similar to the Tokyo case. The equilibrium scheduling pattern and the first-best pricing strategy were examined; our study showed that the time-varying marginal utility model was capable of capturing the marginal external cost more precisely for travelers with a relatively flexible arrival time.
