Travel Data Simulation Tool

Due to the high cost, low response rate and time-consuming data processing, few Metropolitan Planning Organizations can afford collecting household travel survey data as frequently as needed. This paper tested the feasibility of the spatial transferability of the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data by transferring the distributions from national level to a local area after updating. Based on the cluster/transferability models and Bayesian updating module developed in earlier work, this study aims to 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 created 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. By linking the generated travel estimates to the synthetic population, simulated household travel data are created for the application context. Finally, using the add-on samples in the application area as the validation data, comparisons against the simulated data are made to examine the effectiveness of the whole transferability process. Traditionally, transportation planners believed trip rates are easier to be transferred than any other travel statistics. However, this study showed that transferability of other statistics including trip length is also very promising.