Key Travel Demand Model Enhancements

The purpose of this project is to develop and implement car shedding, intrazonal travel, and walk and bike mode choice models that can be used in conjunction with a conventional four-step model to capture neglected effects of the built environment on travel behavior. Conventional four-step models, used by virtually all metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation and local transportation planning agencies to forecast future travel patterns and develop long-range transportation plans, are underspecified, which is to say that important variables are omitted. In particular, conventional models fail to account for local land use patterns, street network designs, and urban design features—indeed, the entire built environment at the scale of a neighborhood or activity center. In many four-step models, vehicle ownership is treated as a function of sociodemographic variables only (or largely), and the phenomenon of car shedding as the built environment becomes more compact is not fully accounted for. In many models, only trips by vehicle are modeled, and trip rates are related only to sociodemographic characteristics of people, not characteristics of place. Bicycling, in particular, is seldom treated as a separate transportation mode. In nearly all four-step models, households, jobs, and other trip generators are assumed to be located at a single point, the zone centroid, and the entire local street network is reduced to one or more centroid connectors to the regional street network. This precludes the modeling of intrazonal travel in terms of the local built environment. While there are other ways in which conventional travel demand models fail to account for land use-travel interactions, these three are the focus of this proposal. This proposal seeks to develop and implement car shedding, intrazonal travel, and walk and bike mode choice models that can be used in conjunction with a conventional four-step model to capture neglected effects of the built environment on travel behavior. These models will be calibrated with data from our 15-region household travel database, the largest household travel database of its sort ever assembled, with over 60,000 households and 600,000 trips. Trips have been linked to built environmental data for buffers around geocoded trip ends. These models will be validated with data from the 2012 Utah Travel Survey. These models will pre-process inputs to the four-step process and/or post-process outputs. They will be incorporated into the Wasatch Front Regional Council-Mountainland Association of Governments four-step model and, based on this case study, will be offered to other metropolitan planning organizations for incorporation into their models.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $25000
• Sponsor Organizations:

  Wasatch Front Regional Council

  295 N. Jimmy Doolittle Rd.
  Salt Lake City, UT  United States  84116

  Utah Transit Authority

  3600 South 700 West, P.O. Box 30810
  Salt Lake City, UT  United States  84130

  Mountainland Association of Governments

  586 E 800 N
  Orem, Utah  United States  84097

  Utah Department of Transportation

  4501 South 2700 West
  Project Development
  Salt Lake City, UT  United States  84114-8380
• Managing Organizations:

  Utah Department of Transportation

  4501 South 2700 West
  Project Development
  Salt Lake City, UT  United States  84114-8380
• Project Managers:

  Nichol, Kevin

  Larsen, Jon

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Utah, Salt Lake City

  City & Metropolitan Planning
  201 South Presidents Circle
  Salt Lake City, UT  United States  84112
• Principal Investigators:

  Ewing, Reid

• Start Date: 20160321
• Expected Completion Date: 20170831
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: Transportation, Planning, Research, and Development

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Built environment; Land use planning; Metropolitan planning organizations; Travel behavior; Travel by area; Travel demand; Travel modes
• Geographic Terms: Utah
• Subject Areas: Passenger Transportation; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01593650
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Utah Department of Transportation
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Mar 15 2016 3:54PM