Machine Learning from Big GPS Data about the Heterogeneous Costs of Congestion

67 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2023

See all articles by Nicolas Koch

Nicolas Koch

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC); University of Hamburg

Nolan Ritter

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)

Alexander Rohlf

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)

Ben Thies

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)

Date Written: July 31, 2023

Abstract

We exploit GPS-coded vehicle movement data that records millions of road users every second of their way over a full year in Berlin to suggest a novel approach to estimate the external costs of traffic congestion from revealed choices in a big data setting. To measure travel choices, we use unsupervised machine learning to assign anonymous commuting and non-commuting trips to individual drivers and track their repeated trip and route choices. We move beyond considering particular roads in isolation and quantify externalities created by actual trips on routes that combine the diverse road technologies of main roads and side streets. Causal identification for the route-level congestion elasticity relies on exogenous increases in traffic density from rerouting induced by traffic incidences that occur on adjacent roads off a given trip’s route. Our findings suggest significant temporal heterogeneity in the marginal external costs of congestion between 3.0 and 87.4 Euro cents per vehicle kilometer during daytime. Hour-specific congestion taxes maximize large welfare gains, while uniform taxes are only 78% as effective.

JEL Classification: D61, D62, H23, Q58, R41

Suggested Citation

Koch, Nicolas and Ritter, Nolan and Rohlf, Alexander and Thies, Ben, Machine Learning from Big GPS Data about the Heterogeneous Costs of Congestion (July 31, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4526796 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4526796

Nicolas Koch (Contact Author)

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) ( email )

Torgauer Straße 12-15
Berlin, 10829
Germany

University of Hamburg ( email )

Von-Melle-Park 9
Hamburg, 20146
Germany

Nolan Ritter

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) ( email )

Torgauer Straße 12-15
Berlin, 10829
Germany

Alexander Rohlf

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) ( email )

Ben Thies

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) ( email )

Torgauer Straße 12-15
Berlin, 10829
Germany

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
187
Abstract Views
659
Rank
331,050
PlumX Metrics