HOUSEHOLD/ZONAL SOCIOECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS AND TOUR MAKING: CASE OF RICHMOND/TRI-CITIES MODEL REGION IN VIRGINIA

Autor: Xueming Chen
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Urban and Regional Analysis, Vol VI, Iss 1, Pp 53-70 (2014)
ISSN: 2068-9969
2067-4082
DOI: 10.37043/jura.2014.6.1.4
Popis: IntroductionIn 2007, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a Special Report 288: Metropolitan Travel Forecasting, Current Practice and Future Directions, which recommends that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and other agencies in the United States using travel demand models begin to transition from the prevailing four-step modeling paradigm to more advanced model forms (for example, improved land use modeling, tour -based models, activity-based models, discrete-choice modeling, supply-side models, TRANSIMS, and others) in order to more effectively respond to new policy and planning requirements (TRB 2007).In 2009, in response to this TRB Special Report 288, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) put out a Virginia Transportation Modeling (VTM) research report entitled "Implementing Activity-Based Models in Virginia." Based on its thorough and objective analysis, the VDOT report recommends an incremental approach to advanced model development, including activity-based models (ABMs). VDOT (2009) recognizes that many challenging requirements (e.g., data, forecast, software, staffing) must be met in order to develop an ABM in Virginia. The development of a fully operational statewide ABM will probably take many years and cost several million dollars before its completion.In line with the long-term goal of ABM development in Virginia, this paper intends to conduct a tour making analysis based on the empirical data provided by the 2009 Virginia National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) Add-On Program. Due to space limitation, this paper only concentrates on the Richmond/Tri-Cities Model Region in Virginia ("the study area") and limits i ts scope of work to statistically examining the relationship between household/zonal socioeconomic characteristics and tour making (tour frequency, length, and complexity). Since this is a demand-side analysis and the basic unit of analysis for NHTS is the household, household socioeconomic characteristics are thus critically important. Meanwhile, it may also be worth testing the impacts of zonal-level socioeconomic characteristics on household tour-making as well, since nobody has ever done this test before. This study intends to set a preliminary stage for more in-depth disaggregated tour- and activity-based analyses in the future.Following this introduction, the rest of this paper is divided into six sections. First, Section 2 provides a literature review. After that, Section 3 presents a research methodology. Subsequently, Section 4 provides an overview of the Richmond/Tri-Cities Model Region, with an emphasis on its socioeconomic and travel characteristics. Section 5 examines the statistical relationship between tour frequency/distance/complexity and household/zonal socioeconomic characteristics. Based on empirical analysis, Section 6 discusses the research results and remaining limitations. Finally, Section 7 summarizes research findings and it draws conclusions.Literature ReviewActivity-based travel demand analysis is believed to have two major advantages over the existing four-step models by providing a better understanding of travelers' responses to transportation policies and programs and an explicit analysis of complex travel patterns such as trip-chaining behavior (Lee et al. 2007). According to VHB (2006), ABMs, by definition, use the tour (rather than the trip) as the basic unit of travel and they are therefore also called tour - based models. It is the tour-based analysis that lays the foundation for ABM development.Over the past four decades, many ABM models have been developed with various degrees of application successes. The earliest ABMs have been developed within the context of European national models in countries such as the Netherlands (Hague Consulting Group 1992), Italy (Cascetta et. al. 1993), Sweden (Algers et. al. 1997) and Denmark (Fosgerau 2002).In Canada, Miller et. al. (2005) uses the 1996 Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS) data in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to develop the tour-based model of travel mode choice. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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