Information about the travel forecasting package, Quick Response System II
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 …
It was 1965 and my sister told my family a joke. She said, “Recently a group of people boarded an airplane. After being seated an announcement came over the loud speaker. ‘This is a recording. You are being transported on the first ever automated airplane. There is no pilot. All flight systems are computer controlled …
I have never felt any fear of liability from faulty travel forecasts that I have performed or were performed with my software for public agencies. It is not that the methodology is perfect, it’s that expectations are so low. The errors inherent in travel forecasting are well documented, so buyers must beware. While I try …
In 2006 Hollywood gave us the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car?, which tried to paint General Motors as misguided or evil for repossessing and destroying almost the whole fleet of EV1s that it had manufactured. As you might remember the EV1 was a short-lived experiment lasting from about the 1996 to the 1999 model …
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 …