The bottleneck model: An assessment and interpretation

The bottleneck model of congestion with endogenous scheduling has become a standard tool of transportation economics It provides surprising insights about the time pattern of congestion, optimal pricing, and many distinct inefficiencies of unpricecl equilibria including wrong departure order with heterogeneous preferences, wrong allocation of users across links of a network, and wrong order in which parking spaces are occupied It illuminates the roles of travel-time reliability, traffic information, and extreme congestion (hypercongestion). It has been developed for use in practical network planning. Future use will probably emphasize greater realism, leading to more practical applications. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.