Information about the travel forecasting package, Quick Response System II
As of this writing there is not a current QRS II tutorial available. QRS II and GNE are written to be comparatively user-friendly, but with all complex software, there is at least a moderate learning curve to surmount. However, nobody getting into the subject of travel forecasting is a dummy, so I am guessing that …
QRS II was never about making money. I initially developed the software with a federal grant to my university, and I was perfectly willing in 1987 to give the software away through the McTrans Center. It was only the decision by the Reagan Administration to kill distribution of QRS II that prompted Shirley and me to begin …
Excerpt from “The Planners Guide to Advocacy Modeling” by Alan Horowitz Chapter 12. Shielding and Weaponizing Your Travel Model Earlier chapters of this book describe methods of building and calibrating a travel model to assure that it produces the desired policy outputs. However, a model will not be particularly useful in advancing a political agenda unless certain steps are taken to …
I must digress. The first house Shirley and I bought was in the Detroit area. After looking at several gorgeous, ridiculously cheap, mansions in the City of Detroit, we decided to look for more modest digs in the suburbs. We wanted to identify the “good” neighborhoods near the GM Tech Center, so on a map I shaded 2-mile radius circles around every K-Mart. The closest hole …
We badly need to overhaul the composition of one particular regional planning agency in Wisconsin. The recent protests over inequities in policing have also told us we have subtle institutional inequities throughout our governments. The inequities cannot be starker than planning in southeast Wisconsin, where I have lived and worked for most of my life. Usually, at this point in an opinion piece the author inserts a disclaimer. My …
Where are All the Trucks? Getting Truck Costs Right Is Really Important Several years ago, I was working with FAF (Freight Analysis Framework) truck assignment results for the upper Midwest. Those early FAF assignments routed trucks according to travel time. I noticed lots of trucks being assigned to the Chicago Skyway. The Chicago Skyway is a short toll road that runs from the south side …
There is a lot of misinformation about the novel coronavirus, and the crisis has been overly politicized. Responses by governments have been fragmented and uncoordinated. Many bad decisions have been made, and many bad decisions will continue to be made. My two engineering degrees are in the area of civil systems analysis, and I can …
I recently read a paper where the authors tried to compute a congestion index from ridesharing data for a city by comparing daytime average speeds to nighttime average speeds. While reading this paper I couldn’t help but to reflect on an experience I had while working at General Motors Research Laboratories decades ago. One GM …
I have been waiting to write this story until two of the main characters had died. It is important that people know how corporate culture can undermine public interest when there is no reason at all for doing so. The events I am going to describe caused me to leave General Motors for my job …
The Transportation and Urban Analysis department I worked in did next to nothing for GM’s bottom line. We were created because GM needed to show Congress and the rest of the country how GM was interested in preventing potentially negative impacts of its products on urban areas. All those goodwill efforts were made redundant in …