Welfare impacts of remote and flexible working policies in the bottleneck model

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of remote and flexible working styles on traffic congestion. We first formulate an integrated equilibrium model simultaneously considering the working style, official work start time, and departure time choice of workers via an extension of the bottleneck model. Subsequently, we derive the equivalent optimization problem of the equilibrium problem as linear programming (LP) and demonstrate that we can obtain an analytical solution to the LP. This analytical solution enables us to assess the effects of remote and flexible working on social surplus and queueing loss. By comparing various situations, we show that implementing remote and flexible work causes higher queueing loss with an equal social surplus than implementing only remote work. Finally, we propose an integrated road management scheme that includes dynamic pricing to prevent this paradoxical phenomenon and efficiently implements remote and flexible working.