Taxi Driver's Route Choice Behavior Analysis Based on Floating Car Data

Taxi drivers are viewed having more driving experience, being more familiar with road traffic condition, and in turn having more rational route choice behaviors than ordinary drivers. Using floating car data (FCD) of Beijing taxi in 2010, this study discusses the influence of road network conditions and traffic status to taxi drivers' route choice behaviors. First, trip information is extracted from FCD using trip-identification method; Second, map matching and K-shortest paths are used to construct the trajectories and the sets of alternate routes, and route similarity evaluation is conducted to build the sample data of route choice behavior analysis; Finally, route choice model for taxi drivers based on Multinomial Logit (MNL) Model is estimated. The result shows that taxi drivers tend to choose the route which has faster driving speed, less frequency of left turns, more proportion of express way and less proportion of minor road, and increasing a left-turn or decreasing travel speed by 2.12km/h has the same effect on route choice utility. This study is expected to be helpful to establish map-matching algorithm of FCD, route guidance scheme and traffic assignment model.