Trip Generation Modelling

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
The Four-Step Model
Trip Generation The number of trips produced from
/attracted to a specific zone.

Trip Distribution The number of trips between each pair

of zones.
Dala dala
Modal Split The number/share of trips made by
Car
transport mode.

Traffic The number of trip/traffic assigned to the

Assignment transport network, e.g. road, bus, rail

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
Review
 What is the purpose of this modelling step? what’s its
output and what’s its input? How does it fit in the 4SM
framework?

 Do you understand the basic definitions?

o Trip, tours, generation, production, attraction,
origins, destinations, home-based, non-home-
based, intrazonal and interzonal trips, etc.

 Do you understand the categories of trips?

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
Review
 Do you understand the explanatory factors of trip
production and attraction?
 Do you understand the modelling methods?
o Growth factor
o Trip rate analysis
o Regression analysis using zone level (total or
means) and household level data as well as
dummies or segmentation
o Cross classification and multiple class analysis
o Choice modelling

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
Review
 Do you understand the strengths and limitations of
these models/methods?

 Why and how do you perform trip production and

attraction balancing?
 Do you understand trip generation implementation
issues?
o Parameter stability; temporal and geographical
stability
o Forecasting input variables
o Inelasticity of trip generation
o Trip chaining focusing on tours or sojourns or linked
trips
CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
 Balancing Productions and Attractions
 One of the premise of trip generation modelling is that
total productions must equal total attractions.

 A wide range of factors (including the fact that the two

values are obtained from different sample sources) will
cause these values to end up being different to some
extent.

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
 Balancing Productions and Attractions
 Also, due to the definition of productions and
attractions, home-based productions in a zone may not
be equal to the corresponding attractions in the same
zone.

 But, areawide (total) productions of any trip purpose --

home-based or non-home-based -- should be equal to
the corresponding areawide (total) attractions.

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
 Balancing Productions and Attractions
 Usually a higher sample size of the household survey
provides better estimates for production values than
the attraction values provided by the activity centres
survey, so it is common practice to adjust or ‘balance’
the attractions to the production estimates;
nevertheless, special conditions might warrant
balancing to attractions.

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
 Balancing Productions and Attractions
 Thus, for example;

 Matching productions and attractions is required for

conservation of matter and for the next step (i.e., trip
distribution).

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
 Balancing Productions and Attractions
 Adjustment or scaling factors for Attractions are
calculated as follows:

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
Choice Methods
 Since individuals choose whether to make specific trips,
discrete choice models such as binary logit can be used
to predict trip productions.
 With binary logit, the probability that an individual will
choose to make one or more trips (as opposed to not
travelling) can be expressed as

CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering
Activity Modelling
• Treat travel as part of set of wider household activities

• These are categorised by “need” or “function”:

o subsistence (e.g., work)
o maintenance (e.g., shopping)
o discretionary (e.g., recreation)

• Finite number of hours in a day/week.

• Households prioritise time spent on each activity:
o trip chaining
o trip substitution
• Structural equation models.
CoET
Department of Transportation and Geotechnical Engineering