All of Scioteca
Communities & Collections By Issue Date Authors Titles Subjects Country / Region
Profiles
Our Authors
My Account
Login

Measuring the Cost of Congestion in Highly Congested City: Bogotá

We provide a novel approach to estimate the deadweight loss of congestion. We implement it for road travel in the city of Bogotá using information from a travel survey and counterfactual travel data generated from Google Maps. For the supply of travel, we find that the elasticity of the time cost of travel per unit of distance with respect to the number of travelers is on average about 0.06. It is close to zero at low levels of traffic, then reaches a maximum magnitude of about 0.20 as traffic builds up and becomes small again at high levels of traffic. This finding is in sharp contrast with extant results for specific road segments. We explain it by the existence of local streets which remain relatively uncongested and put a floor on the time cost of travel. On the demand side, we estimate an elasticity of the number of travelers with respect to the time cost of travel of 0.40. Although road travel is costly in Bogotá, these findings imply a small daily deadweight loss from congestion, equal to less than 1% of a day’s wage.

Abstract

Description

Subject

Ciudades | Investigación socioeconómica | Transporte | Movilidad urbana

País / Región

Colombia

URI

https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/1028

Date

2017-04

Cite from this publication

Collections

6.1 Documentos de trabajo en investigación socioeconómica

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By

Creative Commons license

CC-BY-NC
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as CC-BY-NC
Thumbnail Image

Files

Akbar & Duranton (2017).pdf (5.25 MB)

Authors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

CAF

Related Items

Thumbnail Image
Waits and Delays in Road Freight Transport

This paper studies waits and delays in the trucking industry of a developing country: Colombia. We follow 186,000 longhaul trips over 926 routes between 2015...

Thumbnail Image
Moving Citizens and Deterring Criminals: Innovation in Public Transport Facilities

This paper explores the relationship between urban public transportation innovation and crime. In 2004, the city of Medellin in Colombia developed an innovative public transportation...

Thumbnail Image
Getting to know the Amazon - Path of Orellana

Over six thousand kilometers travelled by air, land and water, most of it on the main course of the Amazon River; going deep into the...

Thumbnail Image
The Role of Geography and Gender in Telecommunications Standards Participation

Do meeting locations shape who influences telecom standards? Using quasi-random variation generated by 3GPP rules that rotate venues across cities, we study attendance at 2,241...

Thumbnail Image
Ibero American comprehensive guide for traffic crash victims

This guide offers a clear and simple explanation of the event, focusing on the legal and psychological scope, with the objective of providing the authorities...

Thumbnail Image
Transportation infrastructure and productivity: evidence from Colombia

This paper analyses the role of transport infrastructure in determining plant level TFP. We calculate TFP from the annual manufacturing surveys using accounting and econometric...