Simplified Modeling of Transit Corridors

A sketch planning model overcoming several drawbacks of the traditional models is developed. This model partitions the urban area into a corridor, in which a transport alternative is introduced, and the complementary part of the urban area. Prediction of travel demand is made separately for the corridor and its complement. Demand for trips outside the corridor is estimated by aggregate methods, while travel demand in the corridor is estimated by a disaggregated model. A sample of 150-300 households is drawn from the corridor zones, and the model is applied to each observation, estimating its travel demand. The household socio-economic and level of service variables are computed or approximated on a disaggregated level. Total demand is estimated by factoring up the demand for each observation by the sampling rate. The trips are assigned to a highly abstracted network until equilibrium between assignment and mode split is reached.