Trip-timing decisions and congestion with household scheduling preferences

Most traffic congestion models assume that agents make trip-timing decisions independently and receive payoffs at the origin and destination that do not depend on whether other agents are present. We depart from this paradigm by considering a variant of Vickrey׳s bottleneck model of the morning commute in which individuals live as couples and value time at home more when together than when alone. We show that the costs of congestion can be higher than for a comparable population of individuals living alone. The costs can be even higher if spouses collaborate with each other when choosing their departure times. To calibrate the model we estimate trip-timing preferences for married and unmarried men and women in the Greater Paris region.