Improving travel-time reliability by the use of trip booking

The congestion of our infrastructure, particularly (urban) motorways, continues to increase. Efficient planning, for instance in freight transport, is hindered by the resulting unreliability of travel times. Another effect of this congestion is a reduced utilization rate of the road. This paper presents trip booking, a method aimed at improvement of the reliability of travel times as well as an increase in the effective use of road capacity. Increased reliability facilitates better logistic planning. Furthermore, it allows the sharing of infrastructure between different modalities, with each modality having its own operational time window. The system aims at open dedicated infrastructure, such as bus lanes and dedicated freight lanes, and preserves the autonomy of both the provider and user of the infrastructure. The advantage claims are supported by simulation results for basic network configurations.