Information about the travel forecasting package, Quick Response System II
I have lately refereed journal submissions where authors have totally evaded the concept of a statistical test while trying to demonstrate the importance of their research. I will give somewhat altered (to protect the identities of the authors and avoid lawsuits) examples later. Mainly, each of these authors has developed an innovation, compared the innovation …
A recent post to the TMIP Forum by Suzanne Childress and subsequent replies gave me pause. The question was innocent enough: what VDF (volume-delay function) should be used with a 100% autonomous vehicle traffic stream. Two people answered that this was the wrong question to ask, but I don’t think this question is going away …
I am on an NCHRP panel that is supervising a project to quantify the benefits of various methodologies for statewide travel forecasting. That project is getting close to finishing, so I wanted to compare our consultant’s findings to whatever may have come out of the recent NCHRP project to create the software tool, TFGuide web …
With much help and encouragement from Kermit Wies and TRB’s ADB45 committee, I have placed most of the content of the Hawaii Guidelines for project-level traffic forecasting on the TFResource.org website in fully editable format. At this moment there are 50 “topics” pages containing just about all the methodologies from the Hawaii Guidelines. Some longer …
Checking some citations within a draft report that I have been reading led me to pervasive alternative facts about the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and traffic improvement strategies. It seems that not only are we daily subjected to incorrect interpretations about the sources of global warming, but we are additionally subjected to incorrect ideas …
Last week the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals dealt a likely lethal blow to WisDOT’s plans to expand a long section of Wisconsin Highway 23 from two lanes to four lanes. The ostensible reason for the negative ruling was WisDOTs failure to use a consistent methodology for preparing its traffic forecasts. But the real …
Kermit Wies, at the 2016 Innovations in Travel Modeling Conference, gave a plenary speech that was honest, soul-bearing, and depressing. He was lamenting about the inaccuracies of travel models and his inability to defend them. Kermit is not alone. Many travel modelers have experienced this sinking feeling that their model might be spewing out seriously …
At a reception at the TRB annual meeting a few years ago I ran into Sue Langdon, one of my former students, and we talked for a while about the remarkable accomplishments of those students who graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee with a specialization in transportation engineering. Sue suggested that it’s a …
There is a smattering of published information on errors in ground data, but this topic needs much more attention by travel modelers. I am narrowly restricting my definition of an “error” to a difference between an actual and a measured ground data item. I refer to a problem which causes a model to fail to …
Juan Ortuzar’s book indeed provides a pivot point formula that allows two or more choice alternatives to be varied at the same time. So a valid question may be raised: which method works best, pivot point or the gravity model, for OD table forecasts? This blog article extends the example problem to pivot point and …