Advancing Methods for Understanding Multimodal Intercity Transportation Characteristics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Intercity transportation in North America has received more attention in recent years due to increasing travel delays on intercity highways and at airports, high infrastructure investment needs, as well as changing social attitudes and tolerances surrounding transportation service characteristics, delays, and environmental impacts. Transportation agencies face major investment decisions with respect to intercity transportation services in the order of billions of dollars; however, our understanding of basic intercity travel characteristics does not match its importance in terms of overall impact to society. This research has three major objectives: 1) to improve our understanding of multimodal intercity transportation, particularly key evolving relationships between intercity travel demand and intercity travel service characteristics; 2) to demonstrate how we can utilize new data sources to build more comprehensive, integrated, and meaningful sources of intercity travel trends to better understand these dynamic relationships; and 3) to improve the systems analysis methods used to compare critical intercity transportation investment and policy decisions, particularly with respect to how we handle uncertainty. The following tasks will serve to meet these objectives. Data made available through new sources such as cellular phone probes will be combined with more traditional sources of data, to track relationships between travel demand and service characteristics as they evolve over time. Also, this research program will develop a new approach for evaluating how different intercity transportation service policy scenarios compare, over a range of uncertainty levels regarding the relationships between service characteristics and demand. This approach provides a systematic method to assess how different scenarios perform relative to one another, even when we are highly uncertain about the underlying mechanisms that affect intercity travel. Overall, this proposed research will provide critical insights that will improve multimodal intercity transportation planning activities. These decisions have a significant impact on the public, and the importance of providing better information for intercity transportation planning cannot be overstressed.