Integration of National Long-Distance Passenger Travel Demand Model with Tennessee Statewide Model and Calibration to Big Data

Abstract

The Tennessee Department of Transportation replaced the quick-response-based long-distance component in its statewide model by integrating the new national long-distance passenger travel demand model in a new statewide model and calibrating it to long-distance trips observed in cell phone origin–destination data. The national long-distance model is a tour-based simulation model developed from FHWA research on long-distance travel behavior and patterns. The tool allows the evaluation of many policy scenarios, including fare or service changes for various modes, such as commercial air, intercity bus, Amtrak rail, and highway travel. The availability of this tool presents an opportunity for state departments of transportation in developing statewide models. Commercial big data from cell phones for long-distance trips also pre-sents an opportunity and a new data source for long-distance travel patterns, which previously have been the subject of limited data collection, in the form of surveys. This project is the first to seize on both of these opportunities by integrating the national long-distance model with the new Tennessee statewide model and by processing big data for use as a calibration target for long-distance travel in a statewide model. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of integrating the national model with statewide models, the ability of the national model to be calibrated to new data sources, the ability to combine multiple big data sources, and the value of big data on long-distance travel, as well as important lessons on its expansion.

Using Mobile Data to Understand Urban Mobility Patterns in Freetown, Sierra Leone

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“…At the time of writing, there were two open-source packages for analyzing mobile data on the market: Flowkit 8 and CDR Data Analysis Tools. 9 Both are designed specifically for analyzing CDRs although they can easily be extended to analyze GPS-based or other trajectory type data sets. The next question may be how to choose one over the other.…”

Conceptual Models of the Effect of Information and Communications Technology on Long-Distance Travel Demand

“…The starting point for this assessment is taken as the U.S. National Long-Distance Travel Model (14,19), both because it represents current thinking on how to model LDT effectively and because it is available for integration into specific statewide models (20). In the development of the National Long-Distance Travel Model, both aggregate and disaggregate model structures were considered.…”

Estimating the Cost and Utility of Statewide Travel Models using Scenario-Based Interviews

“…Statewide travel models are in use or in development in 39 states today, compared with only 19 in 2006 ( 1 ). This growth in statewide modeling has been accompanied by a diversity of methods employed, including three- or four-step trip-based models ( 2 , 3 ), activity-based models ( 4–6 ), dynamic traffic assignment approaches ( 7 ), models that integrate short- and long-distance travel ( 8 , 9 ), those that incorporate national scale models ( 10 , 11 ) and those that make use of emerging “big data” sources ( 10 ).…”