TravInfo (TM) is an advanced traveler information system for the San Francisco Bay Area that began operation in September 1996 under a public/private partnership. The public sector component centers on the Traveler Information Center (TIC), TravInfo (TM)'s information gathering, processing, and dissemination hub. For two years, until September 1998, TravInfo (TM) was a Field Operational Test (FOT) sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration. During the FOT, the TIC was evaluated. This report documents the analysis of operator response time. Response times remained stable throughout the...
Additional highway capacity, by increasing travel speed, affects the individual share of time within a 24-hour budget allocated to various activities (time spent at and traveling to home, shop, work and other), some activities will be undertaken more, others less. This paper extends previous research that identified and quantified induced demand in terms of vehicle miles traveled, by considering questions of what type of demand is induced and which activities are consequently reduced. This paper uses the 1990 and 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey and Federal Highway...
This report contains detailed work plans for the following evaluation tasks associated with the TravInfo evaluation study. These include: the target, Value Added Reseller (VAR) customer studies, and the network performance evaluation. The target study focuses on a high impact Bay Area corridor to evaluate TravInfo impacts or benefits to Bay Area travelers. The network performance evaluation simulates the road conditions in that corridor to estimate TravInfo impacts at the aggregate level. The VAR customer study provides information on those consumers who actually purchase and use Advanced...
This paper discusses how traffic information is obtained and how the congestion of a major freeway affects travel behavior. Immediately following two congestion-causing major highway incidents south of San Francisco, telephone surveys were conducted of commuters who utilize the affected corridor of highway. The incidents took place two weeks apart on the same corridor of US-101, the first affecting southbound traffic and the second affecting northbound traffic. The travel behavior of commuters before and during their commute at the time of each incident was determined, including how they...
Ramp meters are commonly used to relieve congestion on freeways. What is the value of these systems? Ramp metering can alleviate recurrent, regular traffic congestion, such as that caused by the daily commute. The goal is usually to maintain uninterrupted freeway flow at a certain acceptable level, but it transfers delay to the entrance ramp, where excess demand is forced to wait. This report summarizes ramp metering technologies, reviews the algorithms commonly used with them, and uses a traffic simulation model to identify the benefits and costs of using these systems. We used a...
This report examines the interactions among different forms of communication, where travel is also considered a form of communication. Data for this study comes from 148 respondents to the "Activity Diary" survey instrument of the Davis Community Network (DCN) project, which obtained information on 636 uses of DCN. Generation, elimination and modification were considered to be the three major potential results of the present DCN communication and the five major types of communication considered were: in-person, physical object, electronic, in-person with travel, and physical object with...
TravInfo is a Field Operational Test of advanced traveler information systems for the San Francisco Bay Area, sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The project involves a public/private partnership which seeks to compile, integrate and broadly disseminate timely and accurate multi-modal traveler information through commercial products and services. The public sector component centers on the Traveler Information Center (TIC), which collects and integrates both static and dynamic traveler information. The TIC began operations in September 1996 and will operate as an FOT...
The TravInfo project aims to develop a multi-modal traveler information system for the San Francisco Bay Area, developing a partnership between the public and private sectors. This report presents the results of the first wave of institutional interviews, as part of the TravInfo evaluation.
TravInfo is a regional traveler information system in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a Field Operational Test (FOT) over a two-year period from September 1996 to September 1998 with funding from the Federal Highway Administration and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). TravInfo's goal was to broadly disseminate accurate, comprehensive, timely, and reliable information on traffic conditions and multi-modal travel options to the public in the Bay Area. Organizationally, it was structured around a collaborative partnership between and among public and private...
We study the problem of travel time estimation along a section of a freeway based on data derived from vehicle detectors at multiple locations. We pose the problem as one of pattern recognition. We derive algorithms that aim to recognize patterns which persist between the error-prone upstream detector samples and the error-prone downstream detector samples. We describe how these can allow us to estimate the distribution of the travel time between these detector locations. The most promising algorithm derived in this research is a dynamic programming based algorithm based on sequence...
