MODELLING ESCORT TRAVEL IN THE WEST MIDLANDS REGION OF THE UK

摘要

Most tour-based models do not represent escort travel separately. However, escort travel can account for 10% of trips, a fraction that has been growing in recent years. This paper describes how escort travel can be reflected in a tour-based model; we illustrate this through an application in the updated PRISM model for the West Midlands region of the UK. School escort and other escort travel were recorded separately in the household interviews used to develop the new model, and interviewers were carefully briefed to ensure escort travel was recorded properly. Analysis of the West Midlands data demonstrates that escort travel is dominated by school escort travel, and consequently most escort travel is made at the start and end of the school day. Adults in households with children are more likely to make two school escort tours on a given school day than one, and this needs to be taken into account when modelling school escort frequency. As well as tours made purely to escort another household member, escort movements made as a detour during another tour are important, with more than half of outward detours made to escort. Thus to model escort travel properly within a tour-based framework, both escort tours and escort detours should be represented. The tour-based modelling approach describes in this paper could be improved further by moving fully to an activity-based approach. The paper reviews some of the literature in this area and describes how these approaches would be applied to modelling escort travel.