Travel Demand

Designing for Mode Shift Opportunity with Metropolitan Scale Simulation

Deodhar, Kanaad
Laurence, Colin
Jane Macfarlane
2019

Shifting vehicle drivers to alternate modes is becoming a key focus of city planning groups. Key to understanding how to posit new transit opportunities requires a granular understanding of origin-destination travel demand. By using Mobiliti, a HPC simulation developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that populates origins and destinations and simulates their use of the transportation network, that granular understanding can be achieved. This data can be used to understand how current and potential future transit routes serve regional demand and how those services can be improved...

Induced Travel Demand and Induced Road Investment: A Simultaneous Equation Analysis

Cervero, Robert
Mark Hansen
2002

This paper presents simultaneous models that predict induced travel demand and induced road investment using an array of instrument variables reflecting political, environmental, and demographic influences. From a panel data set consisting of 22 years of observations for 34 California urban counties, short-run elasticities are estimated. Both the Vehicle– Miles-Travelled model and the Lane–Miles model feature good statistical fits and highly significant parameter estimates. While the research found strong reciprocal relationships between road investment and travel demand, the elasticity...

Advancing the Science of Travel Demand Forecasting

Joan Walker
Daniel Chatman
Daziano, Ricardo
Erhardt, Gregory
Gao, Song
Mahmassani, Hani
Ory, David
Sall, Elizabeth
Bhat, Chandra
Chim, Nicholas
Daniels, Clint
Gardner, Brian
Kressner, Josephine
Miller, Eric
Pereira, Francisco
Picado, Rosella
Hess, Stephane
Axhausen, Kay
Bareinboim, Elias
Ben-Akiva, Moshe
Brathwaite, Timothy
Charlton, Billy
Chen, Siyu
Circella, Giovanni
El Zarwi, Feras
Marta Gonzalez
Harb, Mustapha
Mahmassani, Amine
McFadden, Daniel
Moekel, Rolf
Pozdnukhov, Alexei
Sheehan, Maddie
Sivakumar, Aruna
Weeks, Jennifer
Zhao, Jinhua
2019

Travel demand forecasting models play an important role in guiding policy, planning, and design of transportation systems. There is no shortage of literature critiquing the accuracy of model forecasts (see, for example, Pickrell, 1989; Wachs, 1990; Pickrell, 1992; Flyvbjerg, Skamris Holm, and Buhl 2005; Richmond, 2005; Flyvbjerg, 2007; Bain, 2009; Parthasarathi and Levinson, 2010; Welde and Odeck, 2011; Hartgen, 2013; Nicolaisen and Driscoll, 2014; Schmitt, 2016; Odeck and Welde, 2017, and Voulgaris, 2019), not to mention several high-profile lawsuits (Saulwick 2014, Stacey 2015, Rubin...

Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Transit Demand During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Bogotá’s BRT System

Caicedo, Juan D.
Joan Walker
Marta Gonzalez
2021

The COVID-19 pandemic restricted most economic and social activities, impacting travel demand for all transportation modes and especially for transit. We hypothesize that the shifts in travel demand varied by socioeconomic status, and we assess the differential impact of COVID-19 in the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) patronage across various socioeconomic groups in Bogotá. We built a database of frequent transit users with data collected by smartcards in Bogota’s BRT system between January and October 2020. For each user in the database, we labeled their home and work stations. Transactions at...

Share, Collaborate, Benchmark: Advancing Travel Demand Research Through Rigorous Open-source Collaboration

Caicedo, Juan D.
Guirado, Carlos
Marta Gonzalez
Joan Walker
2024

This research foregrounds general practices in travel demand research, emphasizing the need to change our ways. A critical barrier preventing travel demand literature from effectively informing policy is the volume of publications without clear, consolidated benchmarks, making it difficult for researchers and policymakers to gather insights and use models to guide decision-making. By emphasizing reproducibility and open collaboration, we aim to enhance the reliability and policy relevance of travel demand research. We present a collaborative infrastructure for transit demand prediction...

Sharing, Collaborating, and Benchmarking to Advance Travel Demand Research: A Demonstration of Short-term Ridership Prediction

Caicedo, Juan D.
Guirado, Carlos
Marta Gonzalez
Joan Walker
2025

This research foregrounds general practices in travel demand research, emphasizing the need to change our ways. A critical barrier preventing travel demand literature from effectively informing policy is the volume of publications without clear, consolidated benchmarks, making it difficult for researchers and policymakers to gather insights and use models to guide decision-making. By emphasizing reproducibility and open collaboration, we aim to enhance the reliability and policy relevance of travel demand research. We demonstrate this approach in the field of short-term ridership...

The General Transit Feed Specification Makes Trip-Planning Easier — Especially During a Pandemic — Yet its Use by California Agencies is Uneven

Karen Trapenberg Frick
Kumar, Tanu, PhD
Li, Ruyin
Patil, Atharva
Post, Alison, PhD
2020

Developed in 2005, the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is making transit trip planning easier by allowing public transportation agencies to share transit schedules in an electronic format that can be used by a variety of trip-planning applications, such as Google Maps. The GTFS can be used to share static transit schedules (GTFS-s) or provide real-time information on transit vehicle arrivals and departures (GTFS-r). Providing real-time updates has proven to be exceptionally valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, between January 13th and April 25th of this year Apple...

Equity Implications of TNC Fare Variation: A Case Study of Didi Chuxing, Shanghai, 2015

Xu, Ruoying
Daniel Chatman
2019

The rise of transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing has been well documented, and is viewed with concern by some policy makers and planners. Some have advocated regulating TNCs to address perceived problems, which include unfair competition with existing taxis, a perception that TNCs may be less safe than conventional taxis, road congestion caused by a proliferation of ride-hailing vehicles, and a belief that TNCs may reduce transit ridership. Possible regulations to address these problems include background checks for drivers, safety standards,...

Design of a Demand-Responsive Transit System

Li, Yuwei
Wang, Jessica
Chen, Justin
Michael Cassidy
2007

This research investigates the feasibility of offering demand-responsive transit (DRT) service to the general public in situations of low demand density. The study region is AC Transit District 2 which consists of the cities of Fremont and Newark, California. We developed a methodology to evaluate operating efficiencies of existing bus lines and line segments, and identified areas suitable for DRT service based on year 2001 data. We proposed an alternating strategy of checkpoint DRT service and compared it to other strategies. The report also described the schema for an automated...

Improving Mobility through Enhanced Transit Services: Transit Taxi Service for Areas with Low Passenger Demand Density

Li, Yuwei
Miller, Mark
Michael Cassidy
2009

This research report is the final deliverable for PATH Task Order 6408: “Improving Mobility through Enhanced Transit Services”. The purpose of this task order is to explore alternative methods of providing transit service to areas with low passenger demand density. This report first presents analytical models for determining optimal headway and line spacing for fixed-route, fixed schedule buses, either with fixed stops or allowing buses to stop anywhere along the route. Next, transit taxi services with either fixed or flexible routes that specifically target focused demand patterns are...