Evaluation of Wide-Area Traffic Monitoring Technologies for Travel Time Studies

Road agencies typically collect travel time information from their network to identify traffic bottlenecks and to quantify the effects of road improvement investments in terms of travel time improvements. Road agencies can benefit from newly emerging automated data collection technologies that acquire travel time information for a large geographical area at lower costs. The objective of the study presented in this paper was to evaluate travel time data obtained from three technologies (i.e., Bluetooth, in-vehicle navigation systems, and mobile phone probes) compared with travel time obtained from probe vehicles equipped with Global Positioning Systems (GPSs). Traffic data were obtained for road types (e.g., freeways, arterials, ramps) in the study area from commercial data providers for a relatively large study area in the Province of Ontario, Canada. A multicriteria methodology was developed to evaluate data from each data provider on the basis of accuracy, coverage, number of observations, and capability to provide data for special facilities such as high occupancy vehicle lanes. The findings of this research suggested that all three technologies could replace traditional, GPS-equipped probe vehicles. This paper offers several recommendations on the use of travel time data from different data providers.