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Abstract Each year in the US, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on transportation infrastructure and billions of hours are lost in traffic. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium spatial framework featuring endogenous transportation costs and traffic congestion and apply it to evaluate the welfare impact of transportation infrastructure improvements. Our approach yields analytical expressions for transportation costs between any two locations, the traffic along each link of the transportation network, and the equilibrium distribution of economic activity across the economy, each as a function of the underlying quality of infrastructure and the strength of traffic congestion. We characterize the properties of such an equilibrium and show how the framework can be combined with traffic data to evaluate the impact of improving any segment of the infrastructure network. Applying our framework to both the US highway network and the Seattle road network, we find highly variable returns to investment across different links in the respective transportation networks, highlighting the importance of well-targeted infrastructure investment.
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Carpooling and the Economics of Self-Driving Cars
We study the interplay between autonomous transportation, carpooling, and road pricing. We discuss how improvements in these technologies, and interactions among them, will affect transportation markets. Our main results show how to achieve socially effiient outcomes in such markets, taking into account the costs of driving, road capacity, and commuter preferences. An important component of the efficient outcome is the socially optimal matching of carpooling riders. Our approach shows how to set road prices and how to share the costs of driving and tolls among carpooling riders in a way that implements the efficient outcome.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1824317
- PAR ID:
- 10099969
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- EC '19 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 581 to 582
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3328526.3329625
