A major strategy of federal ITS initiatives and state departments of transportation is to provide traveler information to motorists through various means, including variable message signs, the internet, telephone services like 511, in-vehicle guidance systems, and TV and radio reports. This is relatively uncontroversial, but its effectiveness is unknown. Drivers receive value from traveler information in several ways, including the ability to save time, but perhaps more importantly, other personal, social, safety, or psychological impacts from certainty. This information can be economically valued. The benefits of reduction in driver uncertainty when information is provided at the beginning of the trip by various means is the main variable we aim to measure in this research, in which we assess user preferences for routes as a function of the presence and accuracy of information, while controlling for other trip and route attributes, such as trip purpose, travel time, distance, number of stops, delay, esthetics, level of commercial development, and individual characteristics. Data is collected in a field experiment in which more than 100 drivers, given real-time travel time information with varying degrees of accuracy, drove four of five alternative routes between a pre-selected OD pair in the Twin Cities

Morning commuters adjust their departure times in response to day-to-day changes in congestion. Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) may enable motorists to employ fundamentally new strategies when adapting their departure times to fluctuations in congestion. At the same time, new driver strategies will likely give rise to different road network behaviors. This paper explores the mutual feedback between driver strategy and traffic system performance through a simulation model of rush hour commuting. Motorists in this model choose departure times according to three adaptive strategies. When commuters apply adaptive strategies that require ATIS in the present model, outcomes for both individual motorists and the system as a whole are by several measures worse than when drivers use a simple strategy that does not require ATIS. These results largely agree with an earlier study of a nearly identical model of rush-hour commuting. This document is available in HTML on the ...