Evaluation of the Accuracy and Automation of Travel Time and Delay Data Collection Methods

Abstract

Travel time and delay are among the most important measures for gauging a transportation system’s performance. To address the growing problem of congestion in the US, transportation planning legislation mandated the monitoring and analysis of system performance and produced a renewed interest in travel time and delay studies. The use of traditional sensors installed on major roads (e.g. inductive loops) for collecting data is necessary but not sufficient because of their limited coverage and expensive costs for setting up and maintaining the required infrastructure. The GPS - based techniques employed by the University of Delaware have evolved into an automated system, which provide s more realistic experience of a traffic flow throughout the road links. However, human error and the weaknesses of using GPS devices in urban settings still have the potential to create inaccuracies. By simultaneously collecting data using three different techniques, the accuracy of the GPS positioning data and the resulting travel time and delay values could be objectively compared for automation and statistically compared for accuracy. It was found that the new technique provided the greatest automation requiring minimal attention of the data collectors and automatically processing the data sets. The data samples were statistically analyzed by using a combination of parametric and nonparametric statistical tests. This analysis greatly favored the GeoStats GPS method over the rest methods.