Information adoption in commuters' route choice in the context of social interactions

The rapid development of information technology has significantly promoted social interactions among people. Social interactions may have become an important channel for commuters to obtain traffic information. Although commuters' own travel experience and Advanced Traveller Information Systems (ATIS) are acknowledged as two common traffic information sources that can impact commuters' route choice, the possible influence of social interactions has not yet been empirically confirmed. Therefore, an empirical study is conducted in this paper to explore whether and how social interactions affect commuters' route choice. The presented study is divided into two phases. First, 1000 commuters are surveyed about their social interactions with other commuters. A total of 809 valid questionnaires are returned from the commuters. The survey confirms that social interactions among the commuters are very common and indeed influence commuters' route choice. Second, because the essence of the influence of social interactions on commuters' route choice is an information-adoption process, partial least squares (PLS) component-based structural equation modelling (SEM) is employed to study the key success factors that influence information adoption in commuters' route choice in the context of social interactions. In the second phase, 236 valid questionnaires were returned. The obtained results demonstrate that information relevance, information accuracy, source expertise, source integrity, usefulness and extraversion are the factors that have significant influence on commuters' information adoption in the context of social interactions; while the roles of responding, trust and field dependence are not significant. Finally, some discussion and inspirations are provided based on the data analysis results. The findings in the presented study offer some insights into using social interaction information to guide commuters' route choice.