Travel Time Reliability for Stockholm Roadways

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness that travel time reliability, apart from expected travel time, is an important component of cost–benefit analysis, especially during congested traffic conditions. A common measure of travel time reliability is standard deviation, and it has been shown that this is a theoretically sound measure under scheduling constraints, provided that the mean lateness factor is known. Hence, in applied cost–benefit analyses, one will need both the standard deviation and the mean lateness factor. These analyses would be particularly simple if the mean lateness were constant across time of day and for different routes chosen. A study was done to explore how the mean lateness varies and how its variations can be approximated. With the use of travel time measurements on individual links, it is shown how mean lateness varies considerably across time and space. It is shown that mean lateness exhibits a time-varying pattern depending on the characteristics of congestion on the link. It is also shown that the location of the link in the network is a significant determinant. The resulting model for mean lateness represents a considerable improvement over existing practice, where the mean lateness is implicitly assumed constant, yet a large portion of its variation remains unexplained. The model is useful for informing future research but is of less value for predicting the mean lateness in broad applied settings.