Perspectives on driver preferences for dynamic route guidance systems

Insights about the design of route guidance systems based on the needs and desires of drivers who are familiar with the travel network are provided. Results from the ADVANCE Intelligent Transportation System operational test, in which more than 100 drivers used vehicles equipped with dynamic route guidance systems for 2-week periods, suggest that such drivers value real-time traffic information, and they want to incorporate their own knowledge and perspectives into the development of route plans which they expect to be superior to those prepared by the navigation computer. This suggests that future route guidance systems likely to be targeted at familiar drivers should be based on a sharing of tasks between computer and driver that takes greater advantage of driver knowledge than that considered in current designs. Specially, the driver should be able to take more responsibility for route planning, with the computer responsible mainly for traffic congestion data acquisition, organization and storage, and evaluation of driver-defined routes.