An empirical study of the deviation between actual and shortest travel time paths

Shortest distance and time route vs. actual route for one person on one day.

Recent working paper:

• Tang, W., and Levinson, D. (2014) An empirical study of the deviation between actual and shortest travel time paths

Few empirical studies of revealed route characteristics have been reported in the literature. This study challenges the widely applied shortest-path assumption by evaluating routes followed by residents of the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area, as measured by the GPS Component of the 2010 Twin Cities Travel Behavior Inventory conducted by the Metropolitan Council. It finds that most travelers used paths longer than the shortest path. This is in part a function of trip distance, trip circuity, number of turns, and age of the driver. Some reasons for these findings are conjectured.