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New Directions for Travel Behavior Modeling: Lessons from Freight Studies
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2024-02-01
[PDF-590.73 KB]
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Abstract:Planners and policymakers rely on data and models to support infrastructure, operational, and other decisions. Attitudinal data, and models that use these data, provide insights into passenger travel behavior that cannot be easily explained by other types of data. However, collecting and using attitudinal data in transportation models has many challenges. Data collection typically involves surveys, which are burdensome and expensive. Attitudinal questionnaires require semantic judgments from survey designers, and they typically result in integer measurements of attitudes. Finally, when implemented in activity based models (ABMs), attitudes can exhibit inconsistent effects on traveler decision-making throughout the model system. This paper presents new ideas for passenger travel behavior modeling, focusing on emerging attitudinal data sources and methods to implement attitudes in passenger ABMs in a behaviorally consistent manner. The paper draws primarily from the freight transportation and business literature, reviewing selected recent studies in these areas and discussing their relevance to passenger travel behavior analysis. Based on this review, we argue that the freight concept of “strategic alignment” can be used to achieve behavioral consistency in passenger ABMs, although some challenges remain such as forecasting attitudes. We also argue that new, Natural Language Based methods for deriving attitudinal measurements from natural text are a promising replacement for surveys. However, while annual reports of businesses provide ample source text for these applications, more effort is needed to identify or develop similarly appropriate sources for passenger travel behavior, beyond social media posts. The significance of this work is its value as a reference and source of new ideas for planners, policymakers, and transportation modelers to consider when collecting and using attitudinal data in studies of passenger travel behavior.
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