Impact of Travel Reliability on Mode Choice: Empirical Analysis with Observed Travel Time Variation Data in Washington, DC

Travel time reliability (TTR) has been recognized as one of the most important factors in travel behavior studies. Most of previous studies make use of stated preference (SP) survey to estimate TTR measures as it’s hard to conduct revealed preference (RP) surveys to gather reliability data. Besides, there is no previous study about Origin Destination (OD) zone level TTR. This paper proposes an approach to estimate OD-level TTR measures based on a rich historical traffic dataset. Three types of missing data problem are carefully addressed. Different TTR measurements are estimated including the standard deviation, 90th minus 50th percentile of travel time, and 80th minus 50th percentile of travel time. The OD-level TTR measures are then joined with the 2007-2008 Transportation Planning Board – Baltimore Metropolitan Council (TPB BMC) household travel survey to provide a comprehensive RP dataset in Washington DC area. The RP dataset is then used to develop three conditional logit models between rail and auto using different TTR measures to analyze the effects of reliability on mode choice behaviors. Models using 80th minus 50th percentile travel time and standard deviation perform slightly better than 90th minus 50th percentile travel time. The results show a significant negative impact of TTR on mode choice. Reliability ratios for different TTR measures are also calculated. When travel time unreliability of driving becomes two times larger than the current situation in the studied OD pairs, 4.6% people will change their mode from driving to rail.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Transportation Demand Forecasting.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Tang, Liang
  • Ghader, Sepehr
  • Mishra, Sabyasachee
  • Zhang, Lei
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automobile travel; Data files; Logits; Mode choice; Origin and destination; Rail transit; Traffic data; Travel surveys; Travel time
• Geographic Terms: Washington (District of Columbia)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01557880
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-4550
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 26 2015 5:27PM