Activity-Based Travel Demand Modeling for Metropolitan Areas in Texas
(PI: Chandra Bhat)
Reliable travel demand forecasts are critical prerequisites to good transportation policy analysis and transportation infrastructure investment and system operations decisions. The need for improved demand analysis procedures has also received a major impetus because of the requirements placed by the Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAAs) and the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) on travel forecasting methods to enable reliable assessment of future mobile-source emission levels and to evaluate the effects of transportation control measures.
The commonly used "trip-based" approach to travel demand analysis, developed in the late 1960s, has a number of limitations, which can lead to unreliable analysis of travel demand management options, and unreliable forecasts of travel demand in response to changing urban form and/or population socio-demographics. The discontent with the conventional disaggregate "trip-based" choice approach has led to the emergence of an activity-based travel approach to explain urban movement. The activity-based approach views travel as a derived demand; derived from the need to pursue activities distributed in space. The approach explicitly considers the all-important link between activity participation behavior and travel behavior, accommodates the interaction among different activities pursued by an individual, and accommodates the interaction between the temporal and spatial dimensions of activity participation.
The activity-based travel analysis approach is intended to be the basis for the next generation of travel demand models. Thus, it is important for the State of Texas to invest in a research program for the development of such a comprehensive activity-based travel modeling approach. The proposed project will develop a methodologically sound, yet application friendly, GIS-based modeling tool for activity-based travel analysis to aid Texas Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in their transportation-air quality modeling efforts, and in the transition from trip-based to activity-based methods.
Areas of Study: