Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling, location choice

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transit, canada, transport planning

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling

The unsustainable nature of current urban transportation and land use is well recognized. What is less clear is the prescription for how to move towards a more sustainable future, especially given the many interest groups involved, the complexity of urban systems and the fragmented nature of decision-making in most urban regions. It is argued that the process of achieving more sustainable transportation requires suitable establishment of four pillars: effective governance of land use and transportation; fair, efficient, stable funding; strategic infrastructure investments; and attention to neighbourhood design. A review of each pillar identifies key issues. The characteristics of an ideal body for governance of land use and transportation are considered. Trade-offs are identified with: spatial representation; organizational structure; democracy; and market philosophy. Effective financing and pricing of urban transportation may be distorted because responsibility for infrastructure is separated from service provision. Financing mechanisms are categorized depending on vehicle use and location. Investment in infrastructure for alternative fuel vehicles and intermediate semi-rapid transit may be required in many cities. Major investment in public transit infrastructure will likely not suffice if macro land use and micro neighbourhood designs are not supportive of these investments.

A useful read, covering a wide swath of topics, and including many useful pointers to other papers within each topic. I found the discussion of financing transportation particularly useful, mostly because I haven't read much about that topic. Discussion of market vs. non-market approaches, including P3s, was also valuable. I'm glad to see discussion of neighbourhood design in the article, a topic which is familiar and close to my heart.

Keywords: transport planning, urban planning, governance, finance, transit, pedestrian planning

Keywords: travel behaviour, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada

This paper provides a quantitative analysis and comparison between the recent Toronto Activity Panel Survey CHASE (Computerized Household Activity Scheduling Elicitor) dataset and a previously collected Quebec City CHASE dataset with the focus on household agenda formation.

The CHASE datasets were analyzed in the context of a newly developed event-driven time-series based activity scheduling framework that explicitly incorporates individuals' agenda formation. The modelling framework, based on McTaggart's concept of time, has two levels of agenda abstraction: conceptual and perceptual, where the second level of abstraction includes provisional sequences of activity episodes. CHASE has been designed to provide detailed observation of scheduling processes and agenda formation. In particular it allows one to trace activity schedule evolution from the planning phase, through modification phases to the execution phase. An original computer algorithm has been applied to the datasets to allow the analyst to visualize the development of provisional activity sequences.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada, travel behaviour

This paper presents a status report concerning on-going research and development work by a team of Canadian researchers to develop a microsimulation, agent-based, integrated model of urban land use and transportation. It describes in some detail the overall design and current status of the ILUTE (Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment) modelling system under development. The overall purpose of ILUTE is to simulate the evolution of an entire urban region over an extended period of time. Such a model is intended to replace conventional, aggregate, static models for the analysis of a broad range of transportation, housing and other urban policies. Agents being simulated in the model include individuals, households and establishments. The model operates on a “100% sample” (i.e., the entire population) of agents which, in the base case, are synthesized from more aggregate data such as census tables and which are then evolved over time by the model. A range of modelling methods are employed within the modelling system to represent individual agents' behaviours, including simple state transition models, random utility choice models, rule-based “computational process” models, and hybrids of these approaches. A major emphasis within ILUTE is the development of microsimulation models of market demand-supply interactions, particularly within the residential and commercial real estate markets. In addition, travel demand is modelled explicitly as the outcome of a combination of household and individual decisions concerning the participation in out-of-home activities over the course of a day. Spatial entities in the model include buildings, residential dwelling units and commercial floorspace, as well as aggregate “spatial containers” such as traffic zones, census tracts or grid cells.

Good references: ConLaw02, VelKapTim00, VosPetDon02.

Their discussion of spatial representation is interesting, and echos (somewhat) my own thoughts on the subject. They have two sections: one on residential representation and one on representations for firms. I'm curious to see how far they've come in the last few months.

They discuss real estate markets, with zonal average prices. Offers can have individual prices, though, overriding zonal averages. It seems that this idea would mesh better with building-based spatial representation-grid based representation makes it hard to store data like “sale price” or compute zonal averages.

I'm a bit baffled by their commercial development model. The grid-based approach they used seems to be based on cellular automata, using logit models for state transitions. But they don't consider adjacency information, which seems like it would be essential for firms-who wants floorspace divided into a random patchwork? Can you really just rearrange floorspace as needed?

Their closing paragraphs are encouraging: they really don't want zones, anywhere.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, spatial modelling

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada, travel behaviour

Recent developments in the area of dynamic household activity scheduling require better understanding of the behavioural aspects of scheduling processes within households, and, in particular, formation and modification of the provisional schedule, conflict resolution, and rescheduling processes. The goal of this paper is to identify and examine scheduling processes within households using data collected in Quebec City using the Computerized Household Activity Scheduling Elicitor (CHASE) survey software. CHASE addresses the problems of detailed data collection not only concerning activities and travel per se, but also scheduling behaviour processes themselves, including dynamic modifications to the schedule during its execution phase. Univariate analysis performed on the CHASE data provides insights and correlations between household characteristics and the nature of these processes but also questions the activity scheduling approach based on generic activity type classification rules.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

The time dimension in decision-making and activity scheduling models in both conceptual and operational applications is a critical issue. A crude conceptualization of time in current models creates a number of problems with representing dynamic decision-making processes and limits the potential of existing models. Event-Driven Time-Series Based Dynamic Model of Decision Making Processes is a proposition of a modeling framework that attempts to simulate the natural way of decision-making and scheduling behaviour which transforms agent's ideas from their conceptual phase through a provisional schedule to eventually executed activity patterns. It is based on concepts of time in philosophy and science of social behaviour and psychology. The Event-Driven Time-Series Based Dynamic Model links short-term scheduling with long-term planning and lifetime decision-making. This provides a natural link with car ownership or land use models and also provides for a dynamic interface with microsimulation models of network performance sensitive to short-term fluctuations of traffic condition. The model explicitly utilizes conceptual and perceptual time-spaces and exploits non-linearity and multidimensionality of decision-making time-space. The decision-making agents explicitly recognize a time horizon and their decision-making behaviour is driven by events.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, intercity transport

Keywords: transport modelling, land use transport link

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada, urban planning, transport planning

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Interesting and useful.

I find one assumption dubious: the decision to use a car for one part of a chain requires its use for the rest of the chain. In a city like Toronto where downtown parking is very inconvenient, I might drive downtown, park, and then do a long chain of trips on foot before returning to the car.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the historical evolution of personal travel behavior in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) over the past 35 years. The analysis indicates that in many respects the GTA taken as a whole is similar to other cities within North America in terms of increasing auto ownership; increasing individual auto-drive trip rates; increasing suburbanization of population and employment into areas poorly served by transit; increasingly complex travel patterns; and transit, at best, maintaining a constant number of trips per capita but losing modal share. The analysis also highlights ways in which the GTA, particularly the city of Toronto, deviates from the North American “norm.” These include transit per capita ridership, overall mode splits, revenue-cost operating ratios are still extremely high by North American standards; the regional commuter rail system has been very successful in attracting increasing numbers of commuters from outside Toronto into the Toronto central area; the continuing strength of the Toronto central area has provided a strong, viable transit service; and more generally, the relatively high density and transit orientation of development throughout the city of Toronto is highly supportive of transit.

Some very useful background on the transportation context of Toronto. While I grew up in that city, I actually knew fairly little about the evolution of its transportation system, so this was quite useful to me. Not very revolutionary in content (it's just a basic historical review), but worthwhile; a few good references (Mee02, Shi97, PucLef96, WriLov02).

Keywords: transport planning, urban planning, canada, transit, urban form

A good overview of the current status of the ILUTE project.

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling

A good report, with a realistic and progressive vision for the future. I found the maps comparing Toronto, Square One and Pearson trip ends extremely interesting (figures II.7 - II.9).

Keywords: transport planning, canada, urban planning, transit, land use transport link, urban form

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Not very useful for my purposes, although I'm sure anyone interested in emissions analysis might appreciate it. It's curious that gasoline prices aren't considered a relevant variable.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: land use transport link, transport modelling

Keywords: transport modelling

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Microsimulation modeling is an emerging approach to activity-based travel forecasting. Household automobile-ownership models are being included in microsimulation travel-demand models more. Implicitly, vehicle price is an important attribute of vehicles in all automobile-ownership models. In order to update prices at each point of time within the simulation, a modeling tool is required to estimate the price of each vehicle at any time. This paper develops a hedonic price model to estimate the expected price of vehicles to be used in a comprehensive urban-transportation modeling system. In this study, the use of a linear hedonic price model was investigated in terms of its application to the market price of automobiles.

Seems pretty reasonable. It's a little surprising that fuel economy makes a car less attractive, but I suppose that's typical of the 1990s vehicle market. Perhaps a repeat of the study today would show different results. (The price of gas was not a study variable, and didn't vary much over the period when the data was collected anyways.)

Keywords: activity-based modelling, ilute, travel behaviour, vehicle ownership

Keywords: transport planning, transit, canada

Keywords: general interest, transit, rail

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, land use transport link

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

detailed annotation

Keywords: transport planning, transport modelling, land use transport link

A clear overview of the classic four-stage transport model, with applications to Toronto, including more emphasis on multi-modal trips etc.

Keywords: transport modelling, canada

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling, urban planning

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: canada, urban planning, transport planning

Recent work in the area of comprehensive transportation modeling systems in a microsimulation framework, more specifically auto ownership modeling, has recognized the need for increased experimentation with dynamic models. Implicitly, dynamic models require longitudinal data. A Toronto area car ownership study was conducted to design and administer a longitudinal survey to fulfill the data requirements for such a dynamic model, to validate the survey results, and to conduct preliminary analysis on those results. An in-depth retrospective telephone survey was conducted with the help of a computer aid in Toronto, Canada. Simple univariate analyses were conducted on the data to determine the relationship between characteristics of the household and the occurrence of vehicle transactions, the choice of vehicle type, the duration a vehicle is held, and the degree of consumer loyalty to different types of vehicles.

I read this after Mohammadian's later papers. It looks like they did collect home/employer locations during the surveys-why didn't they use this information?

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, land use transport link

Proximity to transportation infrastructure (highways and public transit) influences residential real estate values. Housing values also are influenced by propinquity to a shopping facility or a recreational amenity. Spatial autoregressive (SAR) models were used to estimate the impact of locational elements on the price of residential properties sold during 1995 in the Greater Toronto Area. A large data set consisting of 27,400 freehold sales was used in the study. Moran's I was estimated to determine the effects of spatial autocorrelation that existed in housing values. SAR models, using a combination of locational influences, neighborhood characteristics, and structural attributes, explained 83% variance in housing values. Using the “comparable sales approach,” a spatiotemporal lag variable was estimated for every property in the database. This research discovered that SAR models offered a better fit than nonspatial models. This study also discovered that in the presence of other explanatory variables, locational and transportation factors were not strong determinants of housing values. On the other hand, the number of washrooms and the average household income in a neighborhood were found to be significant determinants of housing values. Stepwise regression techniques were used to determine reduced spatial hedonic models.

Keywords: ilute, canada, urban planning, land use transport link

Keywords: canada, transit, transport planning, urban planning, land use transport link

Keywords: sustainability, land use transport link

Keywords: transport planning, urban planning, ilute, canada, urban form, land use transport link

Keywords: ilute, transport modelling, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport planning, canada, congestion pricing, energy, greenhouse gases

An empirical study of the temporal transferability properties of entropy-type trip-distribution models, applied within a fixed geographic region, is presented. Data for the study were drawn from three travel surveys conducted in 1964, 1986, and 1996 in the Toronto region. Very long transfer periods were examined, and a wide variety of model specifications were tested. These specifications ranged from the simple proportional flow model to an occupationally stratified, doubly constrained entropy model, for which spatial separation was measured by highway travel time. These models were estimated using data from 1964 and 1986. The estimated 1964 models were transferred to 1986 and 1996 to predict the distribution of travel. The 1986 models also were transferred to 1996 to predict the distribution of travel. Results showed that the travel-time parameter was not temporally stable. However, pragmatically, the transferred models were found to provide forecasts very comparable to those generated by models estimated in the respective application contexts. Improved model specification consistently resulted in improved precision of the forecasts obtained. In particular, stratification of the data by worker occupation category resulted in models with the best fit to estimation data, as well as forecasts. However, from a decision- oriented perspective, the improvement in precision obtained from additional complexity in specification did not warrant a recommendation for use of more complex models. Thus, the simple, doubly constrained entropy model with spatial separation measured by highway travel time appears satisfactory for use in practical modeling efforts.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, canada

Keywords: spatial modelling, ilute, urban planning, land use transport link

The case is presented for a new, coordinated research and development (R&D) program designed to improve significantly the operational state of practice in integrated urban modeling. First, the authors' view of an “ideal” integrated urban modeling system is described. If developed, this modeling system should be capable of incorporating the best possible understanding of transportation and land use interactions and of addressing planning and analysis needs. Also discussed briefly are current operational modeling capabilities as related to the proposed ideal model. Finally, a multiyear R&D program that was designed to move current practice significantly toward the operationalization of the ideal model is detailed.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, land use transport link, transit

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, transit, land use transport link

detailed annotation

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, transit, land use transport link

Urban areas are very complex and heterogeneous in terms of their population composition and activity systems. The transit system, modal choices and service levels available to the population also varies considerably across space and time. These similarities and differences in choices and levels of explanatory variables facing individual tripmakers have to be explicitly considered in any study of transit behavior. The common practice has been to include user attributes, in addition to the system characteristics, in the modal utility functions to help capture differences in choice behavior across individuals. However, it could well be that the mode-choice behavior of a segment of the population is fundamentally different from other segments of the population. In view of this, some studies have applied segmentation schemes to help identify the subgroups of presumably different travel responses. Typically, such schemes have been based on stratification of the population by a single variable, chosen either based on a priori notions or one-way cross tabulations. This paper develops analytical procedure that simultaneously deals with level of service, socioeconomic and spatial factors to determine the relative role each plays in determining travel behavior. The procedure is applied to data from the Toronto region to illustrate its use.

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

The prevailing practice in travel demand modelling is to estimate disaggregate models of mode choice with data from the most recent cross-sectional travel survey available on an urban area for forecasting purposes. Very often, however, most urban areas have available data from older cross-sectional surveys, which are often entirely ignored in the modelling effort. This paper explores the possibility of pooling data from two independent cross-sectional travel surveys on the same urban area for model estimation and forecasting by applying a model structure which allows for transfer-bias, referred to as the joint context estimation procedure. This procedure consists of joint, full information maximum likelihood estimation of a related set of logit choice models for the contexts which are based on the following two assumptions: (1) differences in model parameter values between contexts are expressible in terms of differences in the contexts' alternative-specific constants and overall scale of the contexts' utility functions; and (2) aside from these differences in alternative-specific constants and scales, model parameters are common across contexts. An empirical case study is presented, involving the use of two datasets, gathered 22 years apart (1964 and 1986) for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), to estimate morning peak period work trip mode choice models. The estimated models are applied in prediction tests on the 1964, 1986 and a third independent data set, the 1991-data, also collected in the GTA. The performance of the joint context models is compared to that of an independent model, estimated on the 1986 data only. The results clearly demonstrate that joint context estimation dominates the independent 1986-model in predictive performance. The paper concludes by briefly discussing the possible roles, which joint context estimation might play in the development of improved transferability of disaggregate choice models.

Keywords: transport planning, transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

Some empirical findings are presented on the relationship between urban form and work trip commuting efficiency, drawn from the analysis of 1986 work trip commuting patterns in the greater Toronto area. Work trip commuting efficiency is measured with respect to the average number of vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) per worker in a given zone. Preliminary findings include VKT per worker increases as one moves away from both the central core of the city and from other high-density employment centers within the region; job-housing balance, per se, shows little impact on commuting VKT; and population density, in and of itself, does not explain variations on commuting VKT once other urban structure variables have been accounted for.

Keywords: urban planning, transport planning, canada, urban form, land use transport link

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute, travel behaviour

This paper provides an overview of the state of the art of microsimulation modeling applied to activity-based travel forecasting. The paper defines what is meant by microsimulation and discusses why microsimulation might be a preferred approach to activity-based forecasting in many applications. The issue of synthesizing and updating characteristics of the population being simulated is addressed in some detail. Examples of various types of microsimulation models which have been developed to date are provided, including microsimulation models of auto ownership, residential mobility, route choice and network performance, as well as activity-based travel forecasting models per se. The paper concludes with a discussion of research development issues associated with the continuing development of operational microsimulation models. These include: further evaluation of population synthesizing and updating methods; determination of appropriate levels of model disaggregation; establishing appropriate linkages between model components; examination of the statistical properties of microsimulation models; and demonstration of the computational feasibility of these very computer-intensive modeling systems.

Keywords: transport modelling

Recent work in the area of transportation and land use modeling and, more specifically, residential mobility modeling has recognized the need for increased experimentation with dynamic models. Implicitly, dynamic models require longitudinal data, which are time-consuming and expensive to collect. As an alternative to panel studies, a retrospective interviewing technique to collect data for use in a dynamic model of residential mobility is examined. A small retrospective survey of households in Toronto, Canada, was conducted using three data collection methods: mail, telephone, and telephone with mail. Ninety complete observations were obtained. The retrospective survey process and the three data collection methods are assessed and evaluated. Though not without problems, the retrospective survey proved to be a favorable alternative to panel studies. The telephone-with-mail survey method showed the most potential for use in future data collection efforts on the basis of its costs, response rates, and quality of data.

Keywords: transport modelling, travel behaviour

An empirical study is presented of the long-range temporal transferability properties within a fixed geographic area of disaggregate logit models of work trip mode choice. The study area is the greater Toronto area, Ontario, Canada. The two temporal contexts are 1964 and 1986, with models estimated from 1964 data being used to predict 1986 travel choices. In addition to the very long transfer period (which does not appear to have been previously examined), a major feature of this study is that a wide variety of model specifications, ranging from the simplest possible market share model to a complex market segmentation model, are tested to investigate the relationship between model specification and transferability. Major findings of the study include (a) as in most transferability studies, model parameters are not temporally stable; (b) pragmatically the transferred models provide considerable useful information about application context travel behavior; (c) in general, improved model specification improves the extent of the model's transferability; (d) an important exception to Point c is the complex market segment model, which appears to be “overspecified” and, in the face of changing contextual factors during the 22-year period predicts 1986 conditions quite poorly; (e) Point c notwithstanding, simple level-of-service models perform very well in terms of their spatially aggregate predictions (which are often of primary practical importance to planners); (f) the models that best fit the estimation context (1964) data do not always transfer the best to 1986 conditions; and (g) “transfer scaling”, in which modal utility constants and scales are updated, can significantly improve model transferability.

Keywords: transport modelling, canada

An empirical assessment of alternative methods of updating disaggregate travel choice models so that their transferability from the estimation context within which they were originally developed to an application context (which differs from the original estimation context geographically or temporally, or both) is presented. The case study for the empirical tests performed is a long-term temporal transfer of work trip logit mode choice models estimated using 1964 data for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to represent 1986 work trip mode choice in the GTA. Three updating procedures that have been previously presented in the literature are examined (Bayesian updating, transfer scaling, and combined transfer estimation), plus a fourth new procedure, joint context estimation. All four procedures assume that a “small” data set of observed travel choices is available for the application context, which can be used in the updating procedure. The case study results indicate that the latter three procedures all possess merit as potential updating methods, with the choice among the three depending on such items as model specification and application context sample size. The results also indicate that if the application context sample size exceeds 400 to 500 observations, then updating may provide little or no improvement over simple estimation of an application context model, especially if “full” model specification is supported by the available data.

Keywords: transport modelling

Keywords: parking, canada, transportation demand management

Keywords: transport planning, energy, greenhouse gases

Keywords: canada, transport modelling

Keywords: canada, transit, transport planning, urban planning, land use transport link, urban form

Keywords: canada, transport planning

Keywords: energy

Keywords: vehicle ownership, discrete choice modelling

Keywords: transport modelling, ilute

Keywords: transport modelling, shopping, destination choice

Keywords: transport modelling, demographics