Transporting parcels on urban passenger rail transit is gaining growing interest as a response to the increasing demand and cost of urban parcel delivery. To analyze the welfare effects of different fare regimes when allowing parcel services on an urban rail transit, this paper models the optimal service problem where the transit operator chooses the number of trains and the departure intervals. By introducing a reduced form train timetable problem, the passenger train crowding model is extended to incorporate the effect of freight train scheduling. We show that the freight users are better off in the time-varying optimal fare regime, while passengers are worse off, and that the time-varying optimal fare regime calls for more trains than the optimal uniform fare regime. However, the reduction in passenger trains due to the introduction of freight service can eliminate the welfare gain from passenger time-varying fare. If the price elasticity of freight demand is relatively high, implementing road toll can generate welfare loss when rail transit is privately operated.

Given the limitations of new urban railway construction in the Tokyo metropolitan area, a time-varying fare policy is expected to be one of the most effective measures to spread the concentrated peak demand. This paper presents an empirical study that examined the theoretical time-varying marginal utility model introduced by Vickrey (1973), using data on urban rail commuters in Tokyo. Then, the departure-time-choice model, under deterministic user equilibrium, was proposed by integration with the empirically identified time-varying marginal utility model. The outputs of the equilibrium model were compared with the results from the traditional constant marginal utility model; our results indicated that the former outputs would be more suitable for a commuting pattern with longer travel distance, similar to the Tokyo case. The equilibrium scheduling pattern and the first-best pricing strategy were examined; our study showed that the time-varying marginal utility model was capable of capturing the marginal external cost more precisely for travelers with a relatively flexible arrival time.

Abstract. This paper investigates the welfare effects of optimal tolling on urban traffic congestion, in a bottleneck model, with mixed freight and passenger users. T he users' marginal utility of time is considered to be varying with time. Under both no-toll equilibrium and socially optimal tolling, the users are found to sort their arrival time according to the increasing rates of marginal utility at the destination. The optimal toll that maximizes social we lfare does not change each user's indirect utilit y relative to the no-toll equilibrium, but completely removes the queue, which also removes the barrier of freight carriers to accept congestion pricing by relating their marginal utilities directly to the toll. When the toll is equally rebated, the proposed social optimal tolling is a Pareto improvement relative to the no -toll equilibrium. T hose more productive users also suffer more in both no-toll equilibrium and optimal tolling, which indicates that a differentiated redistribution of toll revenues could be an incentive to improve productivity.