Making Do with Less: Calibrating a True Travel Demand Model Without Traditional Survey Data

Details

• Creators:
  Ruegg, Steve
• Corporate Creators:
  Steve Ruegg, Parsons Transportation Group
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  Computer Models Data Collection Home Interview Surveys Jamestown (North Dakota) Medium Sized Cities Origin-destination (O-D) Trip Tables Origin And Destination Small Cities Towns Traffic Counts Traffic Models Traffic Surveys Travel Demand Travel Demand Models Travel Surveys

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• Resource Type:
  Proceedings
• Geographical Coverage:
  North Dakota
• Corporate Publisher:
  Steve Ruegg, Parsons Transportation Group
• 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.
• Format:
  PDF
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:f0f9d9b0acb7b3d648876ebdf9f784d41de895f6dd40698167d74ebc9c0ed9be0048c06fa248867384952d25efeb998dca69832dc8c96da7a23e326ad8816901
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/4668/dot_4668_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 216.11 KB ]