Research on 'happiness' suggests that once an average per capital income of around US$10,000 is achieved in a country, further increases in income will not lead to a significant increase in happiness. Additional income will probably often be spent on the satisfaction of mainly 'relative' needs,...

For several decades growth of traffic volumes has outstrippedinvestments inroad infrastructure. The result has been a relentless increase intrafficcongestion. This paper reviews the economic principles behindcongestionpricing in static and dynamic settings, which derive from thebenefits...

We study interaction between the trips of two types of drivers on a two-lane road who differ by their desired speeds. The difference in desired speeds causes congestion, because slow drivers force fast drivers to reduce their speed. An interesting aspect of this type of congestion is that...

Accident costs are an important component of the external costs of traffic, a substantial part of whichis related to fatal accidents. The evaluation of fatal accident costs crucially depends on theavailability of an estimate for the economic value of a statistical life. The aim of the...

This paper considers the second-best problem where not all links of a congested transportation networkcan be tolled. The paper builds on earlier work, in which the second-best tax rule for this problem wasderived for general static networks, so that the solution presented is valid for any graph...

This paper explores the interrelations between pricing, capacity choice and financingin transportation networks. It builds on the famous Mohring-Harwitz result on self-financing ofoptimally designed roads under optimal congestion pricing, and specifically investigates itsins and outs in a...

This paper investigates strategic interactions between a private highway operator anda private transit operator who uses the same highway for its services. Heterogeneity oftravellers is taken into account by considering a continuous distribution of values of time.Demand elasticity arises from...

This paper considers second-best pricing as it arises through incomplete coverage of full networks. The main principles are first reviewed by considering the classic two-route problem and some extensions that have been studied more recently. In most of these studies the competing routes are...

Conventional economic wisdom suggests that congestion pricing would be an appropriate response to cope with the growing congestion levels currently experienced at many airports. Several characteristics of aviation markets, however, may make naive congestion prices equal to the value of marginal...

This paper is concerned with the economics of urban externalities. We start by reviewing the literature on urban externalities, and observe that although many interesting contributions have been made, there seems to be sufficient scope and need for further research, both theoretically and...