Long-Distance and Rural Travel Transferable Parameters for Statewide Travel Forecasting Models.

摘要

The modeling of long-distance trips in statewide models differs from that of urban and regional models that focus on differentiating home-based from nonhome-based trips. Long-distance trips are more likely to be divided into categories by frequency of travel or by purpose such as recreational/tourist versus business-oriented trips. Such considerations are more likely to be indicative of long-distance variations by trip length, mode choice, and other aspects of travel. Most statewide travel demand forecasting models are built upon practices originally developed for urbanized area modeling. In the context of statewide forecasting, rural tripmaking and long-distance intercity travel constitute important market segments, much more so than in urban models. Information describing these markets, and how these markets vary from state to state, is somewhat sparse, and many states do not have the resources to initiate original data collection to develop a set of model parameters. Yet these same states have a pressing need to have confidence in reasonable data for rural and long-distance travel. Furthermore, for the states where local data collection has occurred, there is little basis to assess how reasonable their findings are compared with findings from other states.