Travel Behavior

Incident Management with Advanced Traveller Information Systems

Al-Deek, Haitham
Kanafani, Adib
1991

Advanced Traveller Information Systems (ATIS) can be used to collect and disseminate dynamic information about travel times on highway links. One of the potential uses of these systems is to manage incidents. The objective of this research is to showunder what incident conditions is it relevant to provide real time traffic information to travellers.A model that uses graphical queueing techniques is utilized to define cases when ATIS is beneficial and cases when it is not, and to evaluate its benefits as measured by travel time savings. The model is applied to a simple road network with two...

TravInfo Evaluation (Technology Element) Traveler Information Center (TIC) Study: Operator Response Time Analysis

Miller, Mark A.
Loukakos, Dimitri
2000

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...

Dynamic Traffic Assignment For Automated Highway Systems: A Two-lane Highway With Speed Constancy

Tsao, H. S. Jacob
1996

Dynamic traffic assignment through analytical modeling and optimization has been widely accepted by the IVHS R&D community as a promising traffic control tool for understanding and relieving traffic congestion on conventional highways and city streets. Due to the completely controlled nature of AHS traffic, dynamic assignment of AHS traffic is even more promising. One added dimension of complexity associated with AHS dynamic traffic assignment is lane assignment. Lane changes, for fully utilizing AHS capacity or for exiting, incur disturbances to and hence reduction of longitudinal...

Major Failure Events of Automated Highway Systems: Three Scenarios from the Driver’s Perspective

Tsao, H.-S. Jacob
Plocher, Thomas A.
Zhang, Wei-Bin
Shladover, Steven E.
1997

Automated Highway Systems (AHS) have the potential for offering large capacity and safety gains without requiring significant amounts of additional right-of-way. Since the general public will be the users of the AHS, human factors must play a pivotal role in the research and development of AVCS technologies and AHS operation. In two companion reports, three attributes critical to AHS human factors were identified and seven scenarios featuring variations in these attributes proposed. To ensure the identification of all major compounding attribute combinations, detailed operational events,...

Whence Induced Demand: How Access Affects Activity

Levinson, David
Kanchi, Seshasai
2000

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...

A Link-Based Variational Inequality Model for Dynamic Departure Time/Route Choice

Ran, Bin
Hall, Randolph
Boyce, David E.
1995

The dynamic user-optimal (DUO) departure time and route choice problem is to determine travelers’ best departure times and route choices at each instant of time. In a previous paper, we presented a route-based two-level optimal control model for the DUO departure time/route choice problem. However, this model is not appropriate for large scale transportation networks because some degree of route enumeration is necessary to solve the model. In this paper, we present a link-based variational inequality (VI) formulation for the DUO departure time/route choice problem so that route enumeration...

Impacts of Computer-Mediated Communication on Travel and Communication Patterns: The Davis Community Network Study

Balepur, Prashant Narayan
1998

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 Field Operational Test Evaluation: Information Service Providers Customer Survey

Yim, Youngbin
2000

This paper presents the findings of the customer study of Information Service Providers. TheInformation Service Provider customer study is part of the traveler response evaluation for theTravInfo Field Operational Test. Presently, three private partners of the TravInfo project deploytraffic Web sites using exclusively the TravInfo database. A survey of Web site users wasconducted over seven months from August 1998 – March 1999. A survey instrument wasincorporated into the Web site. The study addressed the usage of Web site information and thetravel behavior of Web site users. The key...

Traveler Response to Innovative Personalized Demand-Responsive Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area

Khattak, Asad J.
Yim, Youngbin
2003

Urban sprawl makes conventional transit less competitive and points to the need for more innovative and flexible demand-responsive transit systems in the future. To increase their efficiency, such systems can take advantage of the emerging advanced public transportation systems technologies, e.g., vehicle location and information systems. However, little is known about how consumers might respond to such systems and what they desire. This paper explores the demand for a consumer-oriented Personalized Demand Responsive Transit (PDRT) service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Such a system...

Transient Aerodynamics in Vehicle Interactions: Data Base Summary

Chen, A.L.
Hedrick, K.
Savas, O.
1998

The vehicles in a platoon will experience transient aerodynamic forces as vehicles leave and join the platoon at various locations. A platoon of scale vehicle models is placed in a wind tunnel and measurements are made of the transient forces and moments as one of the vehicles is moved into and out of the platoon. The results from the wind tunnel experiments will allow the computer vehicle control algorithms to better predict the transient aerodynamics the vehicles in the platoon will encounter during leaving and joining maneuvers.Since a lane change (either leaving or joining a platoon)...