A disaggregate trip distribution model for sketch planning

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for the evaluation of a wider range of alternatives in the planning process. Not only must the planning process address a broader range of alternatives, but it must have the capability of doing so in a much shorter time frame and at substantially less cost. The travel demand forecasting procedures, as traditionally applied, are simply inappropriate to permit an analytical response within the needed time and cost constraints. To address these information needs, a set of quick response procedures and techniques are needed for the preliminary evaluation of land use and transportation system alternatives at a more macroscopic level of detail (i.e., sketch planning). One of the approaches to providing analytical techniques for sketch planning applications is to streamline the existing procedures for such applications. To achieve some of the time and cost savings required of an effective sketch planning methodology, substantially larger zones (i.e., substantially fewer zones) have been used in the modeling process. The use of a common trip length frequency distribution as an objective when performing trip distribution, using the conventional Texas model at two significantly different levels of detail will yield significant differences in the resulting travel pattern estimates..