Investigating correlation between personal route choice behaviors and macroscopic traffic flow distribution based on long-term GPS trajectory data of floating vehicles

Personal route choice behaviors in an urban road network is one of the most important research areas in the field of transportation. This paper aims to investigate the statistic relationship between personal route choice behaviors and macroscopic traffic flow distribution, which is innovative to the literature. The study firstly analyzes routing behaviors based on GPS trajectory data. Further, a statistic analysis for traffic flow distribution was applied. The comparison between route choice behavior and traffic flow distribution exhibits interesting phenomena, i.e., there exist a relationship between time-shortest paths and route choice probability, such a relationship can also be quantified as a linear function, which shows potential application for this research in urban traffic management and operation.