Valuation of different types of travel time reliability in route choice - Large-scale laboratory experiment

Travelers sometimes experience extremely long travel times on a route. The Travel Simulator Laboratory (TSL) of Delft University of Technology is used to study the effect of these extreme experiences on route choice. The TSL allows for a completely controlled experiment and good research methodology. It is hypothesized that together with the average travel time and the variance, the most extreme travel times experienced influence a person's perception of the attractiveness of the route. Travel information is assumed to be able to alter this perception. Data from 2,500 respondents were gathered with the TSL. Route switching behavior after a regular experience and after an extreme experience was analyzed. People switched routes after an extreme experience significantly more often when the information that they received before the route choice was wrong than they did when it was correct. Moreover, travelers clearly preferred a route that is sometimes bad and most of the time good over a route that is symmetrically distributed with a large variance and thus less predictable. Furthermore, mixed multinomial logit models for panel data were estimated. Expected travel time, expected variance, and worst experience were found to be negatively valued. The posed hypothesis seems to be correct on a qualitative level and proves to be a promising field of research. However, much work still has to be done on the mathematical model to draw more specific conclusions on a quantitative level as well.