Why do you take that route?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how specific contextual factors causally influence drivers' route choices using immersive virtual environment data, addressing gaps in causal inference and human factor analysis in route selection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel use of immersive virtual environments to collect high-fidelity data on human factors affecting route choice for causal analysis.

Findings

Contextual factors significantly influence route choice decisions.

Immersive Virtual Environment data enhances causal inference accuracy.

Human-related factors can be quantitatively linked to diversion behavior.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a particular context factor among the variables that a researcher is interested in causally affects the route choice behavior of drivers. To our knowledge, there is limited literature that consider the effects of various factors on route choice based on causal inference.Yet, collecting data sets that are sensitive to the aforementioned factors are challenging and the existing approaches usually take into account only the general factors motivating drivers route choice behavior. To fill these gaps, we carried out a study using Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) tools to elicit drivers' route choice behavioral data, covering drivers' network familiarity, educationlevel, financial concern, etc, apart from conventional measurement variables. Having context-aware, high-fidelity properties, IVE data affords the opportunity to incorporate the impacts of human related factors into the route choice causal analysis and advance a more customizable research tool for investigating causal factors on path selection in network routing. This causal analysis provides quantitative evidence to support drivers' diversion decision.