Policy and Planning as Public Choice: Mass Transit in the United States

Glencoe

McGraw-Hill Education

Travel behaviour research has a pivotal role to play in informing the current worldwide debate over the degree to which the growth in personal travel, notably by private motor vehicle, should be encouraged or controlled. At stake are complex public interests concerning air quality, energy, lifestyle, economic development and the built environment. This international collection of papers on current methodological and substantive findings from the analysis of personal travel is written by leading travel behaviour researchers from the social and engineering sciences. It is organised in four sections: traveller activity and perception&#x3b; stated preference methods&#x3b; dynamic behaviour&#x3b; and improvement of behavioural travel models.

Societal trends have made the need for better travel demand forecasts more urgent, at the same time as making people's travel and activity patterns far more complex. Traditional traffic flow models are no longer sophisticated enough to cope. Activity analysis is seen by many as the solution. It has had a short but intense history in geography, urban planning, time use research and, more recently, transportation. Pioneering activity-based models have now been developed to the point where, some argue, it is time to abandon the traditional four-step model for transportation demand forecasting and to adopt activity-based approaches instead. Others claim that the complexity of such approaches, and their tremendous data requirements, prevent them from having a significant impact. This book explores these claims and the issues associated with them. An introductory section outlines the debate. The body of the work is organised in four sections: modelling developments&#x3b; theories and empirical analyses&#x3b; data needs and data representation&#x3b; and policy analysis. The final section discusses future research directions.

Daganzo, Carlos F

This volume fulfills a long-felt need for a single text which documents the theoretical foundations of travel choice modeling. With contributions from a good cross-section of the leading researchers in the field, the work provides a valuable reference which will be of lasting interest and value. Divided into three parts, Microeconomic Theory, Behavioral Decision Theory and Statistical Theory, the book extends approaches to travel choice modeling beyond the consumer theory developed in economics by applying theories from the fields of geography, psychology and statistics and in doing so addresses two fundamental questions: what are the theoretical foundations of travel choice modeling and what should they be? Containing twenty specially commissioned chapters, this book represents the latest and best thinking in this rapidly expanding field. Activity-based and dynamic approaches are fast emerging as the state-of-the-art in transport modeling and are replacing trip-based models. This book tackles the key theoretical foundations that underpin these new approaches by asking: are there developments in traditional microeconomic theory which make it usable? Is behavioral decision theory a more appropriate theoretical foundation? Which are the statistical data analytical issues in each case and how can they be solved?