The commuter's time-of-use decision and optimal pricing and service in urban mass transit

This paper incorporates the commuter's time-of-use decision into a model of optimal pricing and service in urban mass transit. The model is closely related to the highway bottleneck model, with waiting time at a transit stop treated analogously to queuing time at a bottleneck. The difference arises in the intermittent nature of mass transit capacity provision. It is shown that (1) increased ridership leads to higher average user cost, and (2) the relationship between service frequency and ridership does not conform to the well-known square root principle. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science.