From Macro to Microscopic Trip Generation: RepresentingHeterogeneous Travel Behavior

Background:In four-step travel demand models, average trip generation rates are traditionally applied to static household type definitions. Inreality, however, trip generation is more heterogeneous with some households making no trips and other households making morethan a dozen trips, even if they are of the same household type. Objective:This paper aims at improving trip-generation methods without jumping all the way to an activity-based model, which is a very costlyform of modeling travel demand both in terms of development and computer processing time. Method:Two fundamental improvements in trip generation are presented in this paper. First, the definition of household types, whichtraditionally is based on professional judgment rather than science, is revised to optimally reflect trip generation differences betweenthe household types. For this purpose, over 67 million definitions of household types were analyzed econometrically in a Big-Dataexercise. Secondly, a microscopic trip generation module was developed that specifies trip generation individually for everyhousehold. Results:This new module allows representing the heterogeneity in trip generation found in reality, with the ability to maintain all householdattributes for subsequent models. Even though the following steps in a trip-based model used in this research remained unchanged,the model was improved by using microscopic trip generation. Mode-specific constants were reduced by 9%, and the Root MeanSquare Error of the assignment validation improved by 7%