The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a particular context factor
among the variables that a researcher is interested in causally affects the
route choice behavior of drivers. To our knowledge, there is limited literature
that consider the effects of various factors on route choice based on causal
inference.Yet, collecting data sets that are sensitive to the aforementioned
factors are challenging and the existing approaches usually take into account
only the general factors motivating drivers route choice behavior. To fill
these gaps, we carried out a study using Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE)
tools to elicit drivers' route choice behavioral data, covering drivers'
network familiarity, educationlevel, financial concern, etc, apart from
conventional measurement variables. Having context-aware, high-fidelity
properties, IVE data affords the opportunity to incorporate the impacts of
human related factors into the route choice causal analysis and advance a more
customizable research tool for investigating causal factors on path selection
in network routing. This causal analysis provides quantitative evidence to
support drivers' diversion decision.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
