The Vickrey’s bottleneck model adopted a trip-based approach，which cannot consider the linkage between the commuter’s activity schedule and trip． This paper extends the Vickrey’s bottleneck model to ad-dress the departure time choice in the morning peak by introducing an activity-based bottleneck model． This model explicitly considers the commuter’s trade-off between the utility received by activities at home and at work and the disutility of travel between activity locations． The optimal time-varying toll and step toll are then investigated by using the activity-based bottleneck models with constant and linear marginal activity utility functions． The optimal toll solutions are also compared with the traditional Vickrey’s bottleneck model． The re-sults show that the curve of the optimal solution for the time-varying toll is not piecewise linear but piecewise quadratic when the marginal activity utility is linear． The traditional Vickrey’s bottleneck model overestimates the queuing delay at the bottleneck，the step toll level，and the start time and end time of the morning peak period． The optimal step tolls under the trip-based bottleneck model and the bottleneck model with constant marginal activity utility are half of the maximum value of the optimal time-varying tolls and exactly eliminate half of the total queuing delay at the bottleneck． The trip-based bottleneck model and the bottleneck model with constant marginal activity utility underestimate the role of step tolls in removing the bottleneck queues compared to the bottleneck model with the linear marginal activity utility．