The Impact of Travel-Time Uncertainty on Day-to-Day Route Choices

This paper investigates the impact of travel-time uncertainty on day-to-day route choices of travelers by using a set of laboratory experiments and statistical analytical methods. A route choice experiment with 30 participants was conducted and performed 30 times at five different travel-time-uncertainty levels. The uncertainty of travel time depends on the random term with the normal distribution of five different variances. In each experiment, participants were required to select one of the three routes; the shorter the travel time of selected path, the higher the reward they obtained. According to the experimental data, as the route travel-time uncertainty increased, the correlation between the travel time of the route and the number of selected people gradually weakened, and the travel time was gradually reduced. Compared with fully definite travel information, indefinite travel information was more conducive to the efficient operation of the entire traffic network.