This paper considers the welfare impacts of a range of franchising regimes for congestible highways. For a single road in isolation, it is shown that a competitive auction with the level of road use as the decision criterion produces the socially optimal road (in terms of capacity and toll...

This paper develops a continuous-time -continuous-place economic model of road trafficcongestion with a bottleneck, based on car-following theory. The model integrates twoarchetype congestion technologies used in the economics literature: 'static flow congestion',originating in the works of...