Abstract:
Understanding route choice behaviour in congested, dense urban road environments is a
key factor for the development of traffic demand models, transport policy formulation and
the estimation of willingness-to-pay measures such as the non-work related value of travel
time. However collecting reliable driver route choice preference data is not straightforward.
To this end this paper describes the development of a smartphone-based application to
collect route choice preference data from motorists. The preference data is intended for
the development of route choice models using discrete choice methods which will be
described in a subsequent paper. The paper provides a technical overview of the
development and application of a survey methodology that combines revealed preference
(RP) and stated preference (SP) methods with the advantage of generating route
alternatives based on real-time traffic conditions. The Route Choice Application -
University of Pretoria (RAPP-UP) application is a smartphone-based platform that
generates two realistic route alternatives between user specified origin and destination
(OD) locations with the route alternatives presented on a road map background. The
associated travel time and cost attribute levels for each route are presented to participants
in a choice set format. The application has been successfully implemented with a sample
of Gauteng commuters
