United States Department of Transportation
i
Microsimulation of household and firm behaviors : coupled models of land use and travel demand in Austin, Texas
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2007-12-01
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OCLC Number:243705617
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NTL Classification:NTL-OPERATIONS AND TRAFFIC CONTROLS-OPERATIONS AND TRAFFIC CONTROLS;NTL-PLANNING AND POLICY-Land Use;NTL-PLANNING AND POLICY-Surveys;NTL-PLANNING AND POLICY-Travel Demand;
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Abstract:Households and firms are key drivers of urban growth, yet models for forecasting travel demand often
ignore their dynamic evolution and several key decision processes. An understanding of household and
firm behavior over time is critical in anticipating urban futures and addressing transportation, land use and
other concerns. Birth and death, migration and location choice are defining events in a household’s and
firm’s life cycle, and a study of household and firm evolution requires the estimation and application of
models for each of these. Such an exercise is hindered primarily by a lack of quality micro-data. This study
develops a basic framework for modeling household and firm demographics using microsimulation. Year
2005 zonal household population and employment point data for the Austin, Texas region, coupled with
various, more aggregate data sets, are used to simulate household and firm evolution over time and space.
To ensure a jobs-worker balance, the model may well merit greater synchronization of the population and
firm synthesis models. The simulations also suggest a clear shift of firms and households towards more
central zones, in part because of the cross-sectional nature of the data sets used to calibrate the location
choice models and the lack of density restrictions or other reflections of land-availability constraints on
new development. Essentially, households and firms exhibit a strong centralizing tendency, that Austin’s
land market simply cannot allow, due to space and other constraints on new building. Explicit expressions
of such constraints should prove helpful in future implementations of this work.
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