A revealed preference study on route choices in a congested network with real-time information

The past decades have seen an increased interest in the role of information as a tool to alleviate congestion. However, because the relationship between travelers’ behavior and information provision is not clear yet, the need for more experiments has been claimed in literature. From May 9th, 2011 to July 12th, 2011 a revealed route choice experiment was conducted in The Netherlands. With the aid of GPS devices and travel diaries, the experiment consisted of investigating the behavior of 32 commuters with similar origins and destinations in reaction to different sources and conditions of information provision. In addition, the real traffic condition during the period of the experiment is known, thus allowing us to know the traffic conditions on alternative routes. This paper presents the setup of this unique revealed preference (RP) study of route choice behavior of car travelers driving in a congested network and a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the data set(s). To our knowledge a study on route choice behavior under provision of real time information in which GPS traces, travel diaries, interviews and traffic conditions in a real congested network is available has not yet been shown in the literature. The descriptive analyses presented in this paper focus on perception of route reliability, use of information and adaptive behavior. They are carried out by means of comparisons betwee GPS traces and traffic conditions in the network with travel diaries and interviews. Descriptive analysis of the data set combining the different data sources suggest that travelers’ perception of the routes’ characteristics is biased in favor of the preferred routes, i.e., preferred routes are usually considered to be reliable when in reality they are among the most unreliable; travelers, commuters in particular, do not tend to use information to plan better departure times but instead use it to anticipate expectations regarding traffic conditions. Besides this, habit appears to have a very strong influence on travelers’ behavior and even after experiencing long delays they are willing to stick to their preferred routes.