IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/3r4p6.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Route-choice Strategy on Transit Travel Time Estimates

Author

Listed:
  • Wessel, Nate
  • Farber, Steven

Abstract

Estimates of travel time by public transit often rely on the calculation of a shortest-path between two points for a given departure time. Such shortest-paths are time-dependent and not always stable from one moment to the next. Given that actual transit passengers necessarily have imperfect information about the system, their route selection strategies are heuristic and cannot be expected to achieve optimal travel times for all possible departures. Thus an algorithm that returns optimal travel times at all moments will tend to underestimate real travel times all else being equal. While several researchers have noted this issue none have yet measured the extent of the problem. This study observes and measures this effect by contrasting two alternative heuristic routing strategies to a standard shortest-path calculation. The Toronto Transit Commission is used as a case study and we model actual transit operations for the agency over the course of a normal week with archived AVL data transformed into a retrospective GTFS dataset. Travel times are estimated using two alternative route-choice assumptions: 1) habitual selection of the itinerary with the best average travel time and 2) dynamic choice of the next-departing route in a predefined choice set. It is shown that most trips present passengers with a complex choice among competing itineraries and that the choice of itinerary at any given moment of departure may entail substantial travel time risk relative to the optimal outcome. In the context of accessibility modelling, where travel times are typically considered as a distribution, the optimal path method is observed in aggregate to underestimate travel time by about 3-4 minutes at the median and 6-7 minutes at the \nth{90} percentile for a typical trip.

Suggested Citation

  • Wessel, Nate & Farber, Steven, 2019. "The Effect of Route-choice Strategy on Transit Travel Time Estimates," SocArXiv 3r4p6, Center for Open Science.
  • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:3r4p6
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/3r4p6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5cba2daaf2be3c00170b8832/
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/3r4p6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tommy Gärling & Kay Axhausen, 2003. "Introduction: Habitual travel choice," Transportation, Springer, vol. 30(1), pages 1-11, February.
    2. Kaplan, Sigal & Popoks, Dmitrijs & Prato, Carlo Giacomo & Ceder, Avishai (Avi), 2014. "Using connectivity for measuring equity in transit provision," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 82-92.
    3. Eran Ben-Elia & Robert Ishaq & Yoram Shiftan, 2013. "“If only I had taken the other road...”: Regret, risk and reinforced learning in informed route-choice," Transportation, Springer, vol. 40(2), pages 269-293, February.
    4. Nassir, Neema & Hickman, Mark & Malekzadeh, Ali & Irannezhad, Elnaz, 2016. "A utility-based travel impedance measure for public transit network accessibility," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 26-39.
    5. Boisjoly, Geneviève & El-Geneidy, Ahmed, 2016. "Daily fluctuations in transit and job availability: A comparative assessment of time-sensitive accessibility measures," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 73-81.
    6. Allen, Jeff & Farber, Steven, 2018. "Generating measures of access to employment for Canada's eight largest urban regions," SocArXiv pvrd9, Center for Open Science.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lee, Jinhyung & Miller, Harvey J., 2020. "Robust accessibility: Measuring accessibility based on travelers' heterogeneous strategies for managing travel time uncertainty," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wessel, Nate, 2019. "Accessibility Beyond the Schedule," SocArXiv c4yvx, Center for Open Science.
    2. (Ato) Xu, Wangtu & Zhou, Jiangping & Yang, Linchuan & Li, Ling, 2018. "The implications of high-speed rail for Chinese cities: Connectivity and accessibility," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 308-326.
    3. Kim, Junghwan & Lee, Bumsoo, 2019. "More than travel time: New accessibility index capturing the connectivity of transit services," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 8-18.
    4. Chen, Zhiwei & Guo, Yujie & Stuart, Amy L. & Zhang, Yu & Li, Xiaopeng, 2019. "Exploring the equity performance of bike-sharing systems with disaggregated data: A story of southern Tampa," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 529-545.
    5. Sharma, Gajanand & Patil, Gopal R., 2021. "Public transit accessibility approach to understand the equity for public healthcare services: A case study of Greater Mumbai," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    6. Sharma, Ishant & Mishra, Sabyasachee & Golias, Mihalis M. & Welch, Timothy F. & Cherry, Christopher R., 2020. "Equity of transit connectivity in Tennessee cities," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    7. Stępniak, Marcin & Pritchard, John P. & Geurs, Karst T. & Goliszek, Sławomir, 2019. "The impact of temporal resolution on public transport accessibility measurement: Review and case study in Poland," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 8-24.
    8. Lovejoy, Kristin, 2012. "Mobility Fulfillment Among Low-car Households: Implications for Reducing Auto Dependence in the United States," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt4v44b5qn, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    9. Edmond Daramy-Williams & Jillian Anable & Susan Grant-Muller, 2019. "Car Use: Intentional, Habitual, or Both? Insights from Anscombe and the Mobility Biography Literature," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(24), pages 1-17, December.
    10. Boisjoly, Geneviève & Serra, Bernardo & Oliveira, Gabriel T. & El-Geneidy, Ahmed, 2020. "Accessibility measurements in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and Recife, Brazil," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    11. Toşa, Cristian & Sato, Hitomi & Morikawa, Takayuki & Miwa, Tomio, 2018. "Commuting behavior in emerging urban areas: Findings of a revealed-preferences and stated-intentions survey in Cluj-Napoca, Romania," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 78-93.
    12. Kazagli, Evanthia & de Lapparent, Matthieu, 2023. "A discrete choice modeling framework of heterogenous decision rules accounting for non-trading behavior," Journal of choice modelling, Elsevier, vol. 48(C).
    13. Kevin X. Li & Tae-Joon Park & Paul Tae-Woo Lee & Heather McLaughlin & Wenming Shi, 2018. "Container Transport Network for Sustainable Development in South Korea," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(10), pages 1-16, October.
    14. Kelobonye, Keone & McCarney, Gary & Xia, Jianhong (Cecilia) & Swapan, Mohammad Shahidul Hasan & Mao, Feng & Zhou, Heng, 2019. "Relative accessibility analysis for key land uses: A spatial equity perspective," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 82-93.
    15. Chen, Ching-Fu & Lai, Wen-Tai, 2011. "The effects of rational and habitual factors on mode choice behaviors in a motorcycle-dependent region: Evidence from Taiwan," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 18(5), pages 711-718, September.
    16. Els Hannes & Diana Kusumastuti & Maikel Espinosa & Davy Janssens & Koen Vanhoof & Geert Wets, 2012. "Mental maps and travel behaviour: meanings and models," Journal of Geographical Systems, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 143-165, April.
    17. Rui Xiao & Guofeng Wang & Meng Wang, 2018. "Transportation Disadvantage and Neighborhood Sociodemographics: A Composite Indicator Approach to Examining Social Inequalities," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 137(1), pages 29-43, May.
    18. Delbosc, Alexa & Nakanishi, Hitomi, 2017. "A life course perspective on the travel of Australian millennials," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 319-336.
    19. Guzman, Luis A. & Cantillo-Garcia, Victor A. & Oviedo, Daniel & Arellana, Julian, 2023. "How much is accessibility worth? Utility-based accessibility to evaluate transport policies," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    20. Kevin Maréchal, 2018. "Recasting the understanding of habits for behaviour-oriented policies in transportation," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/270475, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:3r4p6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.