Question

As a Transport Planner for the Ga South Municipality tasked to forecast travel demand in
the municipality, a key step is to model the decision of trip makers to travel. What will
be your key objective in modelling trip makers’ decision to travel? What key variables
will you consider for modelling irrespective of the model to be used, and why are they
relevant? Indicate the source of data on the identified variables in the Ga South
Municipality. (EV,10)

Answer 1

My task is to forecast travel demand in the municipality, and so i need to model the decision of trip makers to travel. So basically we need to develop a model that will simulate the human behaviour while traveling or making a trip.

So my key objective in modelling trip makers decision to travel will be to find out what type of trips people need to make and how many people make such kind of trips and during what time of the day. IF possible we can go one step further and also find out the preferred mode of travel. This is detailed below

a) LAND USE INFORMATION First of all we need to divide the GA south municipality into Traffic Analysis Zones and identify what land use is in each of them. A zone is a collection of parcels from which a certain type of trips will orginate and destinate. Typically it is best to have a same type of land use in each zone, but some times some zones can be large enough to contain several land use types.

b) TRIP GENERATION Now for each zone, we should find out how many trip makers want to travel and at what times during the day. Broadly let us identify the trip makers traveling during the

AM peak period (6am to 10am)

Afternoon peak period(12 to 3pm)

PM peak period (5pm to 7pm)

from the above i can derive the peak one hour within the 3 peak periods when traffic will be highest.

So now we have the following information.

c) TRIP DISTRIBUTION - For each zone next identify the trip distribution. So suppose your O-D matrix has ten zones, then your O-D matrix will be a 13by 13 matrix. Assume that all zones are so small, and there are no internal trips i.e zone to zone. This type of O-D matrix has to be made for the AM peak, for the Afternoon peak, for the PM peak.

Note that the above is an example, you need to expand it for as many TAZ as you have.

d) MODE CHOICE - mode choice sometimes affects the nature and willingess to travel. Now in a very basic case if you assume only automobile travel is there, then you dont need to do this step.but suppose you think multiple modes of travel are there, then we need to determine the mode choice of travelers. So we can prepare a questionaiire to find out some socio economic chaaracteristics of each TAZ like

a) What is your average household size

b) What is the number of automobiles in your house

c) How many working memebers are there in your household

d What mode of transport do you take to work

The above information can be used to determine the share of trips being undertaken by public transport.

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