Advancing Methods for Understanding Multimodal Intercity Transportation Characteristics

近年来，北美的城际交通受到了更多的关注，原因是城际高速公路和机场上的旅行延误越来越多，基础设施投资需求很高，以及围绕交通服务特征、延误和环境影响的社会态度和容忍度的变化。交通机构在城际交通服务方面面临着数十亿美元的重大投资决定；然而，我们对城际交通基本特征的理解与其对社会的整体影响的重要性不相称。这项研究有三个主要目标：1)提高我们对城际多式联运的理解，特别是城际出行需求和城际旅行服务特征之间的关键演变关系；2)展示我们如何利用新的数据来源来建立更全面、更全面和更有意义的城际旅行趋势来源，以更好地理解这些动态关系；以及3)改进用于比较关键城际交通投资和政策决策的系统分析方法，特别是关于我们如何处理不确定性。以下任务将有助于实现这些目标。通过手机探头等新来源获得的数据将与更传统的数据来源相结合，以跟踪旅行需求和服务特征之间的关系，因为它们随着时间的推移而演变。此外，这项研究计划将开发一种新的方法来评估不同的城际交通服务政策情景在服务特征和需求之间关系的一系列不确定性水平上的比较情况。这种方法提供了一种系统的方法来评估不同情景之间的相对表现，即使我们非常不确定影响城际旅行的潜在机制。总体而言，这项拟议的研究将提供关键的见解，将改善多式联运城际交通规划活动。这些决定对公众有重大影响，为城际交通规划提供更好信息的重要性怎么强调都不为过。

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.