CIE 440—Travel Demand Forecasting

The focus of this class is on the state-of-the-art methods for forecasting travel demand. The ability to forecast travel demand is fundamental to any transportation planning effort. The first part of the class will focus on the four-step travel demand forecasting process that consists of the trip generation, trip distribution, mode split and traffic assignment steps. This approach, though aggregate and conventional, has been widely used for planning purposes in the US and other countries in the world.. Recent refinements to the process will also be discussed, along with a brief introduction to activity-based analysis, an alternative paradigm of travel demand forecasting that is behavior oriented and tends to increase the sensitivity of transportation planning models to policy making.