Providing slowdown information to improve selfish routing

TL;DR

This paper models how providing commuters with slowdown information, beyond travel times, can improve or harm traffic flow efficiency, revealing conditions under which such information is beneficial or detrimental.

Contribution

It introduces a simple model for providing slowdown information to commuters and analyzes its impact on traffic equilibrium, highlighting when it improves or worsens congestion.

Findings

Providing slowdown info can improve traffic flow in some networks.

In certain networks, any slowdown information worsens congestion.

The model links slowdown sensitivity to concepts in congestion game theory.

Abstract

Recent research in the social sciences has identified situations in which small changes in the way that information is provided to consumers can have large aggregate effects on behavior. This has been promoted in popular media in areas of public health and wellness, but its application to other areas has not been broadly studied. This paper presents a simple model which expresses the effect of providing commuters with carefully-curated information regarding aggregate traffic "slowdowns" on the various roads in a transportation network. Much of the work on providing information to commuters focuses specifically on travel-time information. However, the model in the present paper allows a system planner to provide slowdown information as well; that is, commuters are additionally told how much slower each route is as compared to its uncongested state. We show that providing this additional information can improve equilibrium routing efficiency when compared to the case when commuters are only given information about travel time, but that these improvements in congestion are not universal. That is, transportation networks exist on which any provision of slowdown information can harm equilibrium congestion. In addition, this paper illuminates a deep connection between the effects of commuter slowdown-sensitivity and the study of marginal-cost pricing and altruism in congestion games.