Urban Day-to-Day Travel and Its Development in an Information Environment: A Review

Abstract

Urban day-to-day travel systems generally exist in various types of cities. Their modeling is difficult due to the uncertainty of individual travelers in micro travel decision-making. Moreover, with the advent of the information age, intelligent connected vehicles, smartphones, and other types of intelligent terminals have placed urban day-to-day travel systems in an information environment. In such an environment, the travel decision-making processes of travelers are significantly affected, making it even more difficult to give theoretical explanations for urban day-to-day travel systems. Considering that analyzing urban day-to-day travel patterns in an information environment is of great significance for governing the constantly developing and changing urban travel system and, thus, of great importance for the sustainable development of cities, this paper gives a systematic review of the theoretical research on urban day-to-day travel and its development in an information environment over the past few decades. More specifically, the basic explanation of an information environment for urban day-to-day travel is given first; subsequently, the theoretical development of micro decision-making related to individual day-to-day travelers in an information environment is discussed, and the theoretical development related to changes in urban macro traffic flow, which can be recognized as the aggregation effect formed by individual micro decision-making, is also discussed; in addition, the development of understanding different types of traffic information that travelers may obtain in an information environment is discussed; finally, some important open issues related to the deep impact of information environment on urban day-to-day travel systems that require further research are presented. These valuable research directions include using information methods to fit day-to-day travel patterns of cities and implementing macro and micro integrated modeling for urban day-to-day travel systems based on complex system dynamics and even quantum mechanics.