The fundamental law of highway congestion revisited: Evidence from national expressways in Japan

• Main Authors: HSU, Wen-Tai, ZHANG, Hongliang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Traffic congestion; Fundamental law of highway congestion; Returns to scale; Speed function; Coverage effect; Japan; Asian Studies; Public Economics; Transportation; Urban Studies and Planning
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1531; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2530/viewcontent/FundamentalLawHighwayCongestion_2014.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The fundamental law of highway congestion states that when congested, the travel speed on an expanded expressway reverts to its previous level before the capacity expansion. In this paper, we propose a theory that generalizes this statement and finds that if there exists a coverage effect, that is,...