Uncovering Equity and Travelers’ Behavior on the Expressway: A Case Study of Shandong, China

Abstract

Understanding equity and travelers’ behavior plays a key role in creating suitable strategies to promote the development of the expressway. Especially, finding clusters of expressway users could help managers provide targeted policies in order to enhance service quality. However, it is challenging to identify expressway travel behaviors, such as traffic flow distribution and users’ classification. Electronic toll collection (ETC) has been widely applied to improve expressway management, because it can record the origin–destination information of users. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the equity and travel behavior of expressway users with a large amount of ETC data. In the first stage, the Gini coefficient is adopted to analyze expressway equity. In the second stage, 12 kinds of indicators are extracted, including number of trips, car type, mean distance, etc. In the third stage, kmeans algorithm is adopted to cluster the users, based on the introduced indicators. Finally, we analyze the traffic flow distribution of each group by constructing a traffic flow network. The results show that the Gini coefficient is 0.4193, which demonstrates evident inequity in the expressway service. Moreover, statistical analysis shows that expressway flow is complicated and 70.77% of travelers do not make repeat trips. It is demonstrated that expressway users can be divided into six groups, and the flow networks of cluster 2 and cluster 3 are connected more closely and evenly than other clusters are.