Building a Travel Demand Model for a Small City
Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Geographic information systems (GIS) software can be used for the data acquisition, analysis and organization needed to build travel demand models. Traffic analysis zones (TAZs) and street networks prepared through GIS software may further be used for building these travel demand models. Small cities with populations less than or near 15,000 are normally covered with fewer census tracts or census block groups than are usually required for defining TAZs at an appropriate level of detail for satisfactory building of a travel demand model. The street network imported from topologically integrated geographic encoding and referencing files either may not provide appropriate detail of street network required for geocoding the employment data, or may not be current enough to incorporate new employers. In this article, procedures for preparing TAZs and building transportation networks for small cities using available information in a desktop GIS platform are presented. Overall, it is understood that GIS software provides efficient tools for data organization, and thus shows promise as an important tool for transportation engineers. However, it should be noted that lack of technical expertise and inadequate resources in smaller cities or rural areas makes the task of applying this modern technology for travel demand modeling difficult. Transportation planners should gain familiarity in using these methods so that they can evaluate the suitability of the available data and assumptions.
Authors: Mukherjee, Avijit, Russell, Eugene R., Landman, E. Dean
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W658596759