This paper uses the bottleneck model of Vickrey (1969) to empirically measure the social cost of traffic congestion in the US. Using a detailed trip-level data, we estimate extra travel time over and above hypothetical free-flow travel time, which we call “queuing time”, for each average commute trip. The estimated individual queuing time implies that the annual cost of congestion borne by all US commuters is about 29 billion dollars. We find that a higher level of congestion in a city may be attributed to a smaller per capita road stock in the city. This paper also empirically quantifies a toll that depends both on the commuter's arrival time and trip distance.

本文使用Vickrey（1969）的瓶颈模型来实证测量美国交通拥堵的社会成本。使用详细的行程水平数据，我们为每个平均通勤行程估算了超出假设的自由流动行程时间（我们称为“排队时间”）的额外行程时间。估计的个人排队时间意味着，美国所有通勤者每年的拥堵成本约为290亿美元。我们发现，城市中较高的拥堵程度可能归因于城市中人均道路存量的减少。本文还根据经验量化了取决于通勤者的到达时间和行程距离的通行费。