Interregional Travel A New Perspective for Policy Making (2016) / Chapter Skim
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6 Data and Analytical Tools for Interregional Transportation Planning and Decision Making
6 Data and Analytical Tools for Interregional Transportation Planning and Decision Making
Pages 135-151
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From page 135... ...
Coordination in the interregional context is complicated further because of the large number of modes involved and because of the many federal, state, and local governments with infrastructure and operating responsibilities. Even though many policy goals -- such as providing efficient service, relieving congestion, and protecting the environment -- may be shared among these public entities, there may be few means of furthering them through actions coordinated at the corridor or interregional level.
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. In short, the data and analytical tools used for planning, evaluating, and developing transportation projects in the interregional domain are seldom derived from an ongoing transportation planning and priority-setting process.
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EXAMPLES OF ANALYTICAL TOOLS Travel Demand Forecasting Models There are three broad types of travel demand models. Aggregate models predict the number of trips taken in a geographic area on the basis of trip production and attraction factors.
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As in the metropolitan setting, the kinds of forecasting models that are most appropriate to the planning of interregional transportation are likely to depend on specific circumstances and the availability of travel data. Heavily traveled and modally diverse corridors such as the Northeast Corridor, where many alternatives involving complex conditions need to be assessed, may have characteristics that favor disaggregate models.
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Default, or ruleof-thumb, coefficients compiled from empirical data are transferable among urban transportation settings when locally specific data are not available for model development.6 Similar standardization could prove valuable for modeling interregional travel demand, especially where regular data collection and analysis activities are not practical. Miller (2004)
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FHWA found that the state models used many approaches, but most used aggregate models because of the ease of implementing them across the state and to aid in the comparison of results with those of models used by MPOs. The report indicates that most of the national models used by other countries for forecasting interregional travel are hybrids.
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For example, most travel forecasting models use the results of other forecasts, such as projections of population, households, and employment. Because these projections are usually developed independently, they can have variances and introduce uncertainties that go unrecognized by the travel demand forecaster.
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. In the context of urban transportation planning, well-established model structures with known elasticities and interrelationships can be referenced and compared with those in the 8 Fifty-eight of the total 258 transportation infrastructure projects studied were rail projects.
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Project Evaluation Methods Transportation investments can have so many first- and second-order economic, social, and environmental impacts that evaluation criteria and methods must be diverse. Some impacts that need to be considered in terms of both their magnitude and their distribution by location and by social group are as follows [partial list developed by Goeller (1974)
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, but there are no standards for valuing these effects. Similarly, the appraisal of new infrastructure to serve interregional travel demand requires assumptions about traveler valuations of time.
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To do so, the agency has shifted the emphasis away from quantifying total net benefits and net costs to measures aimed at showing the distribution of benefits and costs according to defined socioeconomic accounts or categories, including mobility improvements, environmental benefits, operating efficiencies, land use effects, and economic development.13 Proposers assign and support qualitative values, such as high, medium, and low, for each impact category, including one category that addresses user benefits on the basis of travel time savings to users of the regional transit system. For each 13 http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/FY12_Evaluation_Process%281%29.pdf.
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Such data may include household income, employment status, number and size of households, automobile availability, and other socioeconomic attributes of the population. In forecasting interregional travel demand, the relevant study area boundaries or populations of interest must be identified.
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Department of Transportation to establish a National Travel Data Program, a key component of which would be a national program for passenger data collection and analysis. This proposal may be compared with the British National Travel Survey, which is continuous and surveys around 20,000 individuals in 8,000 households each year.14 The passenger data survey would collect information on how, why, when, and where people travel and on factors affecting personal travel such as car availability, driver's license holding, and access to key services.
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SUMMARY Intergovernmental and multimodal planning and programing procedures have guided the development of metropolitan transportation systems for decades. They have helped improve the capacity to analyze urban travel demand and to evaluate transportation initiatives with regard to policy goals.
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REFERENCES Abbreviations FHWA Federal Highway Administration GAO Government Accountability Office TRB Transportation Research Board Adler, T., M Doherty, J
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Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C. Corey, Canapary, and Galanis Research.
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2004. The Trouble with Intercity Travel Demand Models.
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