1372300 - Price of Information and The Spread of Congestion

The use of navigation apps, such as Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, helps us easily navigate around the cities. These apps are often used to know alternative routes that could give the least travel times. Consequently, it has been known that these apps don’t create or alleviate congestion, traffic is simply displaced to other places often in neighborhood streets creating congestion and raising safety concerns among the residents. Considering a calibrated and validated microscopic simulation model of Fremont, California, different penetration rates of vehicles routed using static and dynamic routing were used to assess the impact of such apps. We relate the travel time to the penetration rate of users that could reroute going to their destination to define the price of information. We found that different penetration rates of dynamic routing users have a fluctuating impact to travel time but are consistently low in between 40-70% of the penetration rate. The dynamics of congestion are illustrated by calculating the percentage of congested links and by fitting two macroscopic parameters which are congestion propagation, β, and congestion dissipation rate, 𝛾, considering the system of differential equations analogous to the well-known Susceptible, Infectious, and Recovered (SIR) model in epidemiology. Understanding the spread of congestion can help in designing traffic control and management measures to improve the overall network performance.