Innovations in Travel Demand Modeling, Volume 2: Papers (2008)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

173 Lessons Learned from the Implementation of New York Activity- Based Travel Model Kuo- Ann Chiao, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Ali Mohseni, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Sangeeta Bhowmick, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council The New York Best Practice Model (NYBPM) hasbeen developed and implemented to meet thedemand of regional planners seeking a more accu- rate way to identify transportation requirements and fore- cast demand on the transportation system. It has been used on many regional studies to simulate travel patterns includ- ing where people travel, their modes of travel (car, subway, bus, ferry, walk and bike, or commuter rail), preferred routes (highway versus local roads), and their trip times. NYBPM is an activity- based model that attempts to predict the detailed travel patterns of a diverse popula- tion using numerous travel modes. It does this by intro- ducing innovative approaches to the traditional travel demand models including the concept of journey or tour as the unit of travel; microsimulation, which is used to simulate the travel pattern of each person in the region and among all other modes of travel; and nonmotorized modes. NYBPM covers 28 counties and is divided into 3,586 transportation analysis zones. The model analyzes travel patterns by four time periods and eight trip purposes on six highway and four transit modes. The highways of the region are represented in a geographic information sys- tem (GIS) with more than 53,000 segments. All available transit modes of the New York metropolitan region rang- ing from commuter rail to ferries are also coded in GIS. NYBPM was previewed before a national audience in January 2001 during the TRB Annual Meeting in Wash- ington, D.C., and immediately was in wide implementa- tion throughout the region on various projects in different sizes including: • Air Quality Conformity Analysis; • Southern Brooklyn Transportation Investment Study; • The Gowanus Expressway and Kosciuszko Bridge Study; • Tappan Zee Bridge and the I-287 Corridor Study; • Bruckner Sheridan Expressway Study; • Bronx Arterial Needs Study; and • Goethals Bridge Modernization Draft Environ- mental Impact Study. As one of the first metropolitan planning organiza- tions (MPOs) in the country to develop and implement a new generation of travel demand forecasting models, this paper shares New York Metropolitation Trans- portation Council’s (NYMTC’s) experience throughout different stages of development and implementation of NYBPM. Immediately after release of the models in 1992, NYMTC’s modeling staff was faced with a series of problems, which are discussed in the following sections. IDENTIFIED NYBPM ISSUES Timeliness and Completeness of Data The development of the regional NYBPM, and the data required for its development, largely occurred in the mid- and late 1990s. Networks were developed to represent a 1996 base- year condition, 6 years after the most recent