The Analysis Of External Cost Of Road Congestion In Beijing

As the increasing maladjustment problem between traffic demand and supply in cities, the traffic congestion is becoming more and more serious. Severe road congestion not only brings much inconvenience to people's daily life, but also brings some negative effects such as travel delay, additional fuel cost, environment pollutions, which are called traffic congestion's external costs that should be paid by the whole society. Now Beijing is also suffering the severe congestion that causes substantive loss every year. How much the value of this loss is, and what should we do to reduce the road congestion in Beijing are the subjects we will discuss in this paper.This paper does the research by combining theoretic analysis and empirical analysis, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Based on externality theory, this paper starts by exploring the concept of externality and analyzing the externality of traffic congestion. And then introduces the methods to estimate the external costs, including explaining the negative effects (externality) caused by road congestion qualitatively and introducing Time Loss Model and Texas Transportation Institute's Model (TTIM). After that, the paper develops the TTIM basing on the data can be collected, and calculates the road congestion external costs in the framework of developed TTIM in Beijing in 2005. The quantitative calculated results show that the total costs is 12.557 billion yuan equal to nearly 2% of GDP, and the average costs of per vehicle is 5 300 yuan. At last, learning from the internalization solutions of congestion external costs in foreign counties and considering the situation of Beijing, this paper proposes the Beijing government to make the external costs internally by increasing the fee or tax of vehicle purchases, controlling certificate of owning vehicle entitlement, charging different level fee in different places at different time to the vehicles, encouraging people travel by public transportation. The charge and compensation standard can be established considering the calculating results of congestion external costs. The innovations of this paper are introducing the TTIM into China which is a mature model to value external costs of road congestion, developing the TTIM based on actual condition, valuing the road congestion external costs of Beijing roundly and giving out some solutions to internalize congestion external costs integrating the results of valuation in Beijing.