An Investigation of the Determinants of Truck Drivers’ Routing Behavior

Understanding truck drivers’ routing selection behavior according to congestion level, travel time reliability, and other factors can not only help transportation agencies improve the efficiency of traffic management but also increase the accuracy of travel time predictions. However, most of the existing studies on this subject used nonempirical methods such as stated preference, experimental, and theoretical modeling and simulations because real field data were not available. This research analyzes 17,024 observed trips on I-495 crossing through Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., to explore how truck drivers make routing decisions based on real-time congestion information, travel time reliability, and other factors such as rush hour and day of the week. The east loop of I-495 is defined as the east route, and the north loop is defined as the north route. The results show that the odds of selecting the north route significantly decrease if the travel time index ratio between the north route and east route increases. The research also demonstrates that the planning time index ratio has a significant impact on routing selection. Also, freight drivers’ routing decisions are influenced differently by factors such as morning rush hour, afternoon rush hour, and whether it is a weekday or weekend. A similarly detailed aggregate freight dataset from the Dallas–Fort Worth area validates the results from the Maryland dataset