Microsimulation of Household Travel Survey Data

Due to the high cost, high non-response rate, and time-consuming data processing, only few Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) can afford collecting household travel survey data as frequently as needed. Therefore, planning agencies and transportation planners are interested in exploring techniques that can facilitate transferability or simulation of household travel survey data. This paper presents the process of developing a data simulation tool that can reduce the need for large data collection in the application context. The study attempts to develop a methodology that can facilitate the application of transferring and simulating disaggregate household travel data for local areas. A synthetic population for the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area is developed by a two-stage population synthesis procedure. Then, a standard Monte-Carlo simulation is used to generate values of the travel attributes from the updated distributions of travel statistics for various household lifestyles transferred from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data. By linking the generated travel estimates to the synthetic population, simulated household travel data is created for the application context. Finally, using travel data from the add-on sample of NHTS in the application area as the validation dataset, comparisons against the simulated data are made to examine the effectiveness of the data transferability model. The results of the comparisons are very promising.