Estimating Path Travel-Time Reliability

The estimation of path or trip travel-time reliability is critical to any advanced traveler information system. The state-of-practice procedures for estimating path travel-time reliability assumes that travel times follow a normal distribution and requires a measure of trip travel-time variance. The study analyzes AVI data from San Antonio and demonstrates through goodness-of-fit tests that the assumption of normality is, from a theoretical standpoint, inconsistent with field travel-time observations and that a lognormal distribution is more representative of roadway travel times. However, visual inspection of the data demonstrates that the normality assumption may be sufficient from a practical standpoint given its computational simplicity. The paper then proposes five methods for the estimation of path travel-time variance from its component segment travel-time variances. The analysis demonstrates that computing the trip travel-time coefficient of variation as the conditional expectation over all realizations of roadway segments provides estimates within 13% of field observations for both uncongested and congested conditions