Foreword

This book contains course notes and assignments for a senior / graduate class in transportation planning and elementary travel modeling. A description for this course is:

An advanced course in urban transportation planning. Urban transportation as the outcome of an economic system, details and techniques for four-step travel model development, applications of travel models within a legal and regulatory context.

The book is organized into six units:

  1. Building Blocks
  2. Trip Generation
  3. Trip Distribution
  4. Mode and Destination Choice
  5. Network Assignment and Validation
  6. The Planning Process

It may seem strange to put the chapter covering the planning process at the end of the course, after students have learned the details of quantitative travel modeling. The purpose for this is that I assign a term project where the students build and calibrate a four-step model as they learn the techniques to do so, and then complete an alternatives analysis using their models. To create the time and space to do this project, we cover “softer” and conceptual topics in the second half of the course.

The demonstration model the students calibrate and study is a model built in the Cube travel modeling software for the Roanoke, Virginia, metropolitan region. The model is a relatively advanced four-step, trip-based model with only 250 zones. The limited zone size means that the entire model system runs in approximately 15 minutes on a laptop computer. I am grateful to Virginia DOT for allowing my students the use of this model. Directions on how to use the Roanoke model are given in the Appendices.

A handful of assignments require the students to write numerical programs or estimate statistical models. Some guidance on using R and RStudio to accomplish these assignments is also given in the Appendices.

Acknowledgements

Photographs in the textbook are the work of the author unless otherwise attributed. The vector art in the textbook uses icons from FontAwesome and the Noun Project distributed under creative commons licenses. Specific attributions are below:

  • training wheels by Marco Fleseri from the Noun Project
  • Cover image: TRAX by Ashton Bingham on Unsplash