Mining Factors Affecting Taxi Detour Behavior From GPS Traces at Directional Road Segment Level

In the urban traffic research field, taxi detour behavior analysis can be regarded as one of the most crucial and challenging topics accounting for real-world routing network dynamics with complicated external inducement such as “avoiding congestion sections”, “unfamiliarity with road maps” or just “earning more fee under a longer travel path”. We carried out an interdisciplinary research framework to build a more holistic and profound view of the spatio-temporal distribution of the taxi detour behavior at directional road segment (DRS) level. First, a map matching based detour clustering method was proposed to deal with one week of taxi GPS tracing (divided into 3.4 million occupied trips). Then we employed an established multi-layer road index system in Shenzhen, China, to illustrate the spatio-temporal distribution variation of taxi detour features and statistics. Furthermore, three categories of DRS factors related to road structural attributes, traffic dynamics and point-of-interests (POIs) were defined to fit a selected-sample-based binary logit model. Some remarkable findings include: (i) in Shenzhen on average, 23.5 percent of taxi trips made a detour larger than 2.1 kilometers, which could be astonishingly high considering that only a very few trips yielded formal complaints for fraudulent detouring; (ii) both the level of detour intensity and ratio are affected by road features and dynamics in different spatio-temporal interaction patterns.