The traditional bottleneck model for road congestion promotes the implementation of a triangular, fully time varying, charge as the optimal solution for the road congestion externality. However, cognitive and technological barriers put a practical limit to the degree of differentiation real...

December 1999 - The presence of preexisting tax distortions, and the form of revenue recycling, can crucially affect the size - and possibly even the sign - of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes. The efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can...

In most dynamic traffic congestion models, congestion tolls must vary continuously over time to achieve the full optimum. This is also the case in Vickrey's (1969) 'bottleneck model'. To date, the closest approximations of this ideal in practice have so-called 'step tolls', in which the toll...

We estimate the marginal external congestion cost of motor-vehicle travel for Rome, Italy, using a methodology that accounts for hypercongestion (a situation where congestion decreases a road's throughput). We show that the external cost - even when roads are not hypercongested - is substantial,...