Travel Behavior

Investigation of Traveler Information and Related Travel Behavior in the San Francisco Bay Area

Khattak, Asad J.
Targa, Felipe
Yim, Youngbin
2003

Advanced Traveler Information Systems are becoming an integral part of urban transportation systems. This paper discusses issues related to how people access, acquire and use travel information. The perceived benefits and willingness to pay for dynamic information are discussed. Empirical evidence from a major field operational test is examined to answer questions about why, how and who uses travel information. Empirical evidence suggests that information helps travelers to switch routes and departure time. The potential for information benefits is perhaps higher in cases of unexpected...

Trav Info Evaluation ( Technology Element ) Traveler Information Center ( TIC ) Study: Operator Interface Analysis - Phase III

Miller, Mark
Loukakos, Dimitri
1998

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...

Using Technology to Improve Transportation Services

Garrison, William L.
1988

Today's transportation systems are well deployed in the developed nations, and they and their supporting activities are technologically and institutionally mature. This situation is exceptional in the perspective of the last 200 years of transportation development, during which new systems were innovated and wave after wave of construction undertaken.An examination of the ways technologies were shaped and adopted in the past reveals that today's view of technology-based opportunities is also exceptional. Consistent with system maturity, the search for improvements is focused on marginal...

Transit ITS Simulator (TRANSITS): Design Document

Dessouky, Maged
Singh, Ajay
Hall, Randolph
1997

This report describes a simulation model developed to evaluate the impact of using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for bus tracking, on controlling buses in wide-area transit networks. Control strategies with ITS will be compared against those without ITS (i.e., they do not rely on communication or tracking). The model is developed using a general-purpose simulation language, AweSim (Pritsker, 1997). The simulation model is generic and independent of any dedicated transit network. The model has high flexibility and can be used to simulate...

An Analytical Dynamic Traffic Assignment Model with Probabilistic Travel Times and Travelers' Perceptions

Liu, Henry X.
Ban, Xuegang
Ran, Bin
Mirchandani, Pitu
2002

Dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) has been a topic of substantial research during the past decade. While DTA is gradually maturing, many aspects of DTA still need improvements, especially regarding its formulation and solution capabilities under the transportation environment impacted by the Advanced Transportation Management and Information Systems (ATMIS). It is necessary to develop a set of DTA models to acknowledge the fact that the traffic network itself is probabilistic and uncertain, and different classes of travelers respond differently under uncertain environment, given different...

Personalized Demand Responsive Transit Systems

Yim, Y. B.
Khattak, Asad J.
2000

An aging population in the US, low-density urban sprawl and the accessibility needs of certain groups (particularly disabled and aged) increasingly point to more flexible demand-responsive transit systems in the future. This paper describes the important aspects of a consumer-oriented Personalized Demand Responsive Transit (PDRT) service. The system will provide services to the traveling public for journeys to work and for journeys to other destinations. A PDRT that responds to the travelers' needs and takes advantage of the emerging advanced public transportation technologies to increase...

Incident Management: Process Analysis And Improvement Phase 1: Review Of Procedures

Hall, Randolph
Mehta, Yatrik
1998

This working paper examines the process for managing incidents on highways, as it is applied in Los Angeles County. The examination is based on interviews with various agencies, including law enforcement, state highway department, coroners office, and LA County MTA Freeway Service Patrol, along with direct observation through ride-alongs. Follow-up work will quantify the benefits of improved incident management, through analysis of freeway performance and response characteristics during incidents.

Estimation Of Travel Time Distribution And Detection Of Incidents Based On Automatic Vehicle Classificatin

Anatharam, V.
1998

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...

Ideal Dynamic User-Optimal Route Choice: A Link-Based Variational Inequality Formulation

Ran, Bin
Boyce, David E.
1995

The ideal dynamic user-optimal (DUO) route choice problem is to determine vehicle flows on each link at each instant of time resulting from drivers using actual minimal-time routes. Actual route time is the travel time incurred while driving along the route. In a previous paper, we presented a route-based optimal control model for the ideal DUO route choice problem. However, this model is not appropriate for largescale transportation networks because some degree of route enumeration is necessary to solve the model. In this paper, we first present the traffic network constraints and link-...

An Enhancement to Speed Estimation with Single Loops

Lin, Wei-Hua
Dahlgren, Joy
Huo, Hong
2003

Traffic data from single loop detectors are one of the dominant data sources widely used in many traffic operation centers and traveler information systems. Speed estimation from single loop detectors is mainly based on occupancy data, a conversion factor from occupancy to density (which is related to vehicle length), and the assumed relationship between flow, speed, and density. This paper investigates the discrepancy between the speed estimated with single loops and the speed measured directly from double loops. It was found that the inaccuracy of speed estimation with single loops is...