Congratulations to soon to be Dr. Carlos Carrion (shown in the center of the picture, between alums Nebiyou Tilahun and Pavithra Parthasarthi), who recently defended his Ph.D. Thesis “Travel Time Perception Errors: Causes and Consequences” (a draft of which is linked). He is working as a post-doctoral researcher at MIT/SMART in Singapore.

Travel Time Perception Errors: Causes and Consequences
Abstract:
This research investigates the causes, and consequences behind travel time perception. Travel times are experienced. Thus, travelers estimate the travel time through their own perception. This is the underlying reason behind the mismatch between travel times as reported by a traveler (subjective travel time distribution) and travel times as measured from a device (e.g. loop detector or GPS navigation device; objective travel time distribution) in collected data. It is reasonable that the relationship between subjective travel times and objective travel times may be expressed mathematically as: Ts = To + ξ. Ts is a random variable associated with the probability density given by the subjective travel time distribution. To is a random variable associated with the probability density given by the objective travel time distribution. The variable ξ is the random perception error also associated with its own probability density. Thus, it is clear that travelers may overestimate or underestimate the measured travel times, and this is likely to influence their decisions unless E(ξ) = 0, and Var(ξ) ≈ 0. In other words, travelers are “optimizing” (i.e. executing decisions) according to their own divergent views of the objective travel time distribution.
This dissertation contributes novel results to the following areas of transportation research: travel time perception; valuation of travel time; and route choice modeling. This study presents a systematic identification of factors that lead to perception errors of travel time. In addition, the factors are related to similar factors on time perception research in psychology. These factors are included in econometric models to study their influence on travel time perception, and also identify which of these factors lead to overestimation or underestimation of travel times. These econometric models are estimated on data collected from commuters recruited from a previous research study in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region (Carrion and Levinson, 2012a, Zhu, 2010). The data (surveys, and Global Positioning System [GPS] points) consists of work trips (from home to work, and from work to home) of subjects. For these work trips, the subjects’ self-reported travel times, and the subjects’ travel times measured by GPS devices were collected. Furthermore, this dissertation provides the first empirical results that highlight the influence of perception errors in the valuation of travel time, and in the dynamic behavior of travelers’ route choices. Last but not least important, this dissertation presents the most comprehensive literature review of the value of travel time reliability written to date.