Predicting Demand for Engineered Facilities

Recent decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the size and complexity of planning and transportation models. Associated with these model building activities has been the desire to accurately forecast demand, which in turn, involved complex predictions of population, income, land use, and a variety of variables, all of which affect future use of engineered facilities. The degree of attempted sophistication of these modeling activities has frequently been at odds with the accuracy or reliability of the given data or with the final use of the results. Less sophisticated procedures that are transparent (intuitively obvious) to a wide range of community participants are needed, and they must be based upon an understanding of how accurate we need to be.