This paper develops and applies a practical method to estimate the benefits of
improved reliability of road networks. We present a general methodology to estimate the
scheduling costs due to travel time variability for car travel. In contrast to existing practical
methods, we explicitly consider the effect of travel time variability on departure time
choices. We focus on situations when only mean delays are known, which is typically the
case when standard transport models are used. We first show how travel time variability
can be predicted from mean delays. We then estimate the scheduling costs of travellers,
taking into account their optimal departure time choice given the estimated travel time
variability. We illustrate the methodology for air passengers traveling by car to Amsterdam
Schiphol Airport. We find that on average planned improvements in network reliability
only lead to a small reduction in access costs per trip in absolute terms, mainly because
most air passengers drive to the airport outside peak hours, when travel time variability
tends to be low. However, in relative terms the reduction in access costs due to the
improvements in network reliability is substantial. In our case we find that for every 1 Euro
reduction in travel time costs, there is an additional cost reduction of 0.7 Euro due to lower
travel time variability, and hence lower scheduling costs. Ignoring the benefits from
improved reliability may therefore lead to a severe underestimation of the total benefits of
infrastructure improvements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:5463 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Kroes, Eric, Koster, Paul, Peer, Stefanie |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-017-9764-4, http://link.springer.com/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/5463/ |
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