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years due to retirement or better opportunities. These staff members cannot be replaced in a timely fashion because of the hiring freeze imposed by the hosting agency. INSTITUTIONAL COORDINATION As an MPO, NYMTC must take a regional perspective in all of its work and products. NYBPM implementation requires consideration of two important factors: work- ing with stakeholders and getting consensus. Working with Stakeholders Throughout the model development process, NYMTC staff work closely with all stakeholders to define the model needs and applications at the beginning of the process. All modeling issues and application support, coordination of data collection efforts, discussion of model calibration and validation results, and issues related to model usage and improvements require close involvement of stakeholders in the complex NYMTC region. NYTMC staff held 10 sessions with stakeholders throughout the NYMTC region to discuss modeling needs that became the guidance for NYBPM develop- ment. NYMTC staff also coordinated with stakeholders on various modeling issues, including data sharing among different zonal systems, consensus building on socioeconomic and demographic forecasts, design and implementation of regional household travel survey, update of regional highway and transit networks, and building the traffic count database for the 2,300 screen line locations. In addition to the complexity involved with the large number of stakeholders, data from stake- holders with inconsistent formats and definitions required the NYBPM project team to spend a lot of resources to reconcile the assembled data into a common database format for use in NYBPM. Building Consensus NYMTC staff had to work with stakeholders to reach consensus on all stages of the model development process, including the definition of zonal system, the sur- vey design, the forecasts and calibration results, and so forth. One of the required inputs to the NYBPM was the socioeconomic demographic data and forecasts. While base- year data were collected from various public agen- cies in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, eco- nomic models were run to forecast future years by county. The future- year forecasts for the four main variablesâ population, household, employment, and labor forceâ were shared with local and county agencies to ensure consistency with individual county forecasts. This was a drawn- out process in which membersâ sug- gestions were often divergent, resulting in conflicting forecast numbers. After several rounds of modifications, and numerous meetings and negotiations, the forecasts were finally found acceptable and adopted by the MPO member agencies. Consensus building among the stake- holders is vital in the NYMTC forecasting process. These forecasts are used in all the major investment studies and corridor- level studies in the region. FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS With more than 4 years of experience, NYMTC has many ideas on sensitivity tests and improvements of model performance, ease of use, and quality control pro- cedures, to name a few. Those ideas are either under con- tracts with University Transportation Research Center and consultants to implement, or will be implemented through various model improvements and contracts in the years to come. One of the problems of NYBPM is its long running times. Previous experiments and new developments sug- gest massive speedups are possible, however. NYBPM will also try to relax hardware requirements so that more users could use NYBPM, create a full- featured User Interface and a super fast version for production. To address the data standard issues, NYMTC staff has been working with member agencies through the traffic, transit, and GIS data coordination committees to standardize all data collection in the region. These groups consist of all NYMTC member agencies who are actively working together to collect traffic and transit data in a standardized format so they can be shared among all the agencies. This will avoid duplication and save the region staff time and money. It will also mini- mize any data reconciliation problems in the variability of data from different sources. A GIS- based traffic data editor and viewer developed by NYSDOT has been used as the traffic data clearinghouse for the NYMTC region. Other ongoing improvements include: ⢠Scenario and file management; ⢠Automated reporting and output manager; ⢠New user guide with content- sensitive online assistance; ⢠Improve usability and applicability; ⢠Move to the latest versions of TransCAD; ⢠Exploit features of new TransCAD process; ⢠Streamline and optimize model code; 175LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE NEW YORK ACTIVITY-BASED TRAVEL MODEL