Modeling the Impact of Smart Growth on Travel Choices: An Enhanced Travel Demand Forecasting Approach

This paper intends to develop an enhanced travel demand forecasting framework that is sensitive to assess the impacts of smart growth strategies on travel behavior. The refinement focuses on intrazonal trips which are often neglected by the traditional four-step travel demand forecasting method. In the two major steps of trip generation and mode split, separate models are developed to quantify the impact of land use on intrazonal trip making. The modelling results indicate that the balanced and diverse land use in terms of population and employment distributions will encourage more intrazonal trips, shorter travels, and the usage of transit and non-motorized modes. In addition, the enhanced modelling framework is applied to evaluate several smart growth scenarios for the Greater Buffalo-Niagara area in New York. As found, the overall Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) and Vehicle Hours Travelled (VHT) will be reduced with the improvement of balance and diversity of land use.