National and Inter-Regional Travel Demand Modeling: Data Sources, Methodological Options, and Applications

Transportation models at the national level are important and in many cases necessary for passenger travel and investment policy analysis. This paper synthesizes methodologies for multimodal inter-regional passenger travel demand estimation. The nations and regions with their models reviewed in this paper share many similarities either with China or its typical provinces in terms of population, geographical scale, and the need for studying long-distance intercity travel. Recommendations of alternative approaches toward a national/province-level multimodal inter-regional travel analysis tool in China, as well as the potential data limitations and innovative long-distance travel data collection methods, are discussed.