An innovative method to collect route choice preference data using a smartphone application

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