NTL Record

Title Making Do with Less: Calibrating a True Travel Demand Model Without Traditional Survey Data
Record ID 7497
Personal Name
Creator
Ruegg, Steve
Source Date Held: 19970519-19970523; Sixth TRB Conference on the Application of Transportation Planning Methods
Corporate Creator Steve Ruegg, Parsons Transportation Group
Publisher Steve Ruegg, Parsons Transportation Group
Publication Date 19970000
Language English
Abstract For many small and medium-sized cities, funding a full Home-Interview survey, with costs as high as $100 per household, is not feasible. Traditionally, such a survey has provided the basic foundation for developing a truly useful travel demand model. Without it, model development has been handicapped by the lack of such behavioral, disaggregate data. Using a set of consistent, concurrently taken counts, external travel behavior from an older study, and a detailed zone system, a technique has been developed that can produce a fully specified, classical travel demand model. The technique relied on the fact that a sufficiently robust set of simple traffic counts contain a great deal of travel behavior information implicitly. Not only can this model be calibrated quite closely to existing counts, but it can be used as a forecast tool, requiring only socioeconomic and network data. In other words, the traffic count data was tied not only to a current origin-destination (O-D) trip table, but also to distribution parameters, time of day parameters, and trip generation rates at the zone level. The procedure involves an extended application of the O-D from traffic count technique (which is implemented through a macro in EMME/2), essentially working the four-step modeling process in reverse. Through iterations of the model, proper generation and distribution parameters can be developed, which, when finished, reliably reflect actual conditions. This technique can be a very cost-effective way for small and medium-sized cities to obtain a travel demand modeling capability which is not simply a product of borrowed parameters from another area, but is indeed calibrated to local, observed conditions. This paper describes this technique, and the results of an application in Jamestown, ND. 10p.
Rosap ID dot:4668
Rosap URL https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/4668
TRT Terms Medium sized cities; Small cities; Towns; Travel demand; Travel surveys; Traffic surveys; Traffic counts; Origin and destination; Data collection; Traffic models; Computer models
General Subjects Home interview surveys; Jamestown (North Dakota); Origin-destination (O-D) trip tables; Travel demand models
Classification NTL - PLANNING AND POLICY - PLANNING AND POLICY;
NTL - PLANNING AND POLICY - Surveys;
NTL - PLANNING AND POLICY - Travel Demand;
NTL - REFERENCES AND DIRECTORIES - Statistics
Geographical
Coverage
North Dakota
TRIS Online
Accession No
00789769
Resource type Proceedings
URL https://ntlrepository.blob.core.windows.net/lib/7000/7400/7497/789769.pdf
Format PDF
Database NTL Digital Repository