Simulating Travel Reliability

We present a simulation model designed to determine the impact on congestion of policies for dealing with travel time uncertainty. The model combines a supply side model of congestion delay with a discrete choice econometric demand model that predicts scheduling choices for morning commute trips. The supply model describes congestion technology and exogenously specifies the probability, severity, and duration of non-recurrent events. From these, given traffic volumes, a distribution of travel times is generated, from which a mean, a standard deviation, and a probability of arriving late are calculated. The demand model uses these outputs from the supply model as independent variables and choices are forecast using sample enumeration and a synthetic sample of work start times and free flow travel times. The process is iterated until a stable congestion pattern is achieved. We report on the components of expected cost and the average travel delay for selected simulations.