Sustainable Transportation Modeling

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Urban regions in Canada and globally are exploring methods to enhance sustainability through policies to advance the use of lower-impact modes, such as walking and public transportation. Transportation engineers are challenged to develop models to evaluate interventions that advance sustainability goals. This research program aims to further this objective. Of particular interest is the modeling of pedestrian tours - walking trips on which travelers are able to accomplish multiple activities within a given spatial and temporal budget. Productive pedestrian tours allow individuals and household to achieve their necessary travel with few environmental impacts and with only modest household resource allocation. Successful pedestrian tours reduce longer distance, higher impact interzonal travel. ******In a modeling framework advancements are necessary to improve the representation of pedestrian tours. Conventional approaches assume that travelers choose a destination zone for a given trip purpose based on the attributes of candidate zones, typically measured as a function of land use metrics, and the proximity of that zone to the origin. The inherent assumption in this approach is that once a traveler reaches a zone, that traveler has access to all of the attributes of that zone. Naturally, this is not the case with pedestrian tours. In some large zones, a pedestrian may only have a budget of time and effort that allows them to access a small portion of the zone and, as a result, only a subset of activities. Conversely, in a well designed urban environment, a pedestrian may have access to activities in multiple adjacent zones. Thus the existing approach lacks both total spatial resolution and an understanding of the distribution of activities within a zonal structure to appropriately model pedestrian tours.******To address these limitations, this program will accomplish these goals. First, using an existing smartphone app, additional data will be gathered on pedestrian activities in a number of urban settings. From these data, observations will be made on the distribution of pedestrian tours in duration and distance. More advanced metrics will be developed and applied to quantify land use diversity and density. These metrics and other representations of the built environment will then be tested for their explanatory power in determining spatial and temporal boundaries on pedestrian tours. Using the results of these analyses, conventional zonal structures for travel forecasting models can be reassessed and redefined as a function of land use properties that are directly relevant to pedestrian activities. The models can then be re-calibrated and validated for their ability to predict pedestrian behavior on a very local scale. With these more sophisticated models, transportation professionals will be better positioned to evaluate infrastructure or operational changes that advance sustainability goals.