Martin Lee-Gosselin

THE ROLE OF EXPOSURE IN COMPARISONS OF CRASH RISK AMONG DIFFERENT DRIVERS AND DRIVING ENVIRONMENTS

Crash rates based on drivers, driver-kilometers, and driver-days in the denominator were compared, using survey estimates of time and distance driven and the annual frequency of traffic crashes in Ontario. Rates by age, sex, and region were computed for all crashes and for crashes resulting in injury or fatality. Young male drivers remained at high risk for all types of denominator; older women had high rates when distance was included in the denominator. When time spent driving was substituted, men and women drivers over 60 had very similar rates. For comparisons of rural residents with urban and northern residents, time and distance give equivalent results. These findings suggest that apparent differences in crash risk per kilometre, whether for older women or for urban drivers, is explained by differences in typical driving speed and environment. Exposure time is better than distance to explain crash risk among drivers and regions with very different driving patterns and environments.

Time vs distance as measures of exposure in driving surveys

A survey of drivers carried out in Ontario in 1988 has provided data on time spent driving as well as the distances driven for licensed drivers of both sexes in six age groups and three regions. Substantial differences were found in times, distances, and distance/time ratios among these groups. Men drove 50% greater distances, but spent only 30% more time driving than women; speed, averaged over each days driving, was lower for older drivers than for younger drivers. Differences in speed reflect differences in the driving done in urban or rural areas, and differences in the opportunity for road crashes; such differences, whether based on units of time or distance, will also affect both the comparisons of accident rates and the perceptions of risk among different groups of drivers. A definition of exposure to risk of road crash is required that considers both time and distance appropriately.

Transport survey methods : keeping up with a changing world

At the 2008 International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Annecy, France, transport survey methodologists and practitioners shared their experience with keeping abreast of the data needs of a rapidly changing world. Over the past decade, this has translated into the need for: an expanded travel survey toolkit; methodological innovation for surveys of freight and public transport operations; a growing use of data collection and processing technologies; a need to align surveys with other data streams; and an increased interest in the comparability of international datasets on personal travel and commodity movements in an era of globalisation. We discuss how these guided the choice and scope of the five themes around which both the Annecy Conference and this book were organised. The International Steering Committee for Travel Survey Conferences (ISCTSC) organises periodic international conferences on the survey methods that support planning, policy development, modelling and evaluation through the observation of person, vehicle and commodity movements at the urban, rural, regional, intercity and international scales. The evolution of the underlying issues, and the methodological response, can be seen in the series of publications that drew on previous conferences, most recently the 1997 Grainau Conference (Stopher & Jones, 2000), Transport Survey Methods Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISBN: 978-1-84855-844-1 the 2001 Kruger Conference (Stopher & Jones, 2003) and the 2004 Costa Rica Conference (Stopher & Stecher, 2006). That evolution includes: a gradual expansion of the travel survey toolkit beyond the needs of ‘core business’ urban area household travel surveys and national travel surveys; a growing recognition of the need for new approaches to collecting data on freight movements and public transport operations; an increasing expectation that data from transport user surveys should be aligned with other data streams from administrative and commercial sources; a growing application of digital technologies to aid data collection and processing; an increased attention to international (and within nation) comparisons of data on personal travel and commodity movements, and to international flows in the context of a progressive globalisation of national economies. With this in mind, the Transport Survey Methods Conference held in Annecy, France, in May 2008 was designed to continue the emphasis of previous meetings on transport survey quality and on the standards for assessing and maintaining quality (e.g. Stopher, Wilmot, Stecher, & Alsnih 2006), and also to look ahead to transport survey data harmonisation and comparability within and across countries. It was a concerted response to the evolving need to track and compare key policy measures and statistics, and their implications for sustaining mobility, in today’s global, interconnected world. For example, how can we track and compare long distance mobility in Belgium versus the United States when the two nations employ different definitions of a long distance trip? (Bonnel, Madre, & Armoogum, 2005) What does it mean that the mobility rate is around three trips per day in a Netherlands metropolitan area and around four trips per day in the Grenoble metropolitan area? Can we attribute this difference to policy measures in respective areas, true travel behaviour differences, different survey methodologies or different spatial boundary definitions? (Bonnel, 2003). As a community, transport survey researchers, practitioners and planners need advance knowledge of the components of survey and data collection design that are upstream from reliable and accurate intra-national and international comparisons. The topics of the Annecy Conference were intended to facilitate such discussions, and in a few cases to initiate them. It was also hoped that progress would be made towards the development of a framework for harmonising passenger transport survey data and statistics along the lines of what has been done for road freight data at European level (Pasi, 2008). At the same time, it was recognised that some classes of transport surveys are not yet ready for such a framework, and may require some fairly fundamental methodological research in the shorter term. Other classes — for example those that explore hypothetical travel behaviour under a range of possible future environmental pressures — are not intended to generate national statistics, but merit our attention for other sound reasons. The Annecy Conference thus sought a balance between the themes of data harmonisation and the data quality. With its workshop format, the conference continued the ISCTSC tradition to create an opportunity for networking, collaboration 4 Patrick Bonnel et al.

Household Activity Rescheduling in Response to Automobile Reduction Scenarios

Forecasting the enduring and wider implications of emerging travel demand management and automobile reduction policies has proved to be a challenging task. Travel behavior researchers point to the need for more in-depth research into the underlying activity-travel scheduling processes as a means to improve the ability to do so. The objective of this research is to explore the household rescheduling and adaptation process to vehicle reduction scenarios. Descriptive results from two, small-sample, in-depth experiments are presented. The first experiment focused on households’ response to a fuel prices increase, whereas the second focused on the response of two-vehicle households to long-term removal of one vehicle from the household. Results indicate that households are aware of a broad range of possible adaptation strategies, including not only mode changes but also a wide variety of changes in activities, planning, and longer-term lifestyle changes. When people were asked to actually implement such stated strategies under realistic conditions, a much more elaborate behavioral response was elicited. This included multiple rescheduling decisions involving several activities and household members over the course of a day or even several days. Thus, even relatively straightforward stated response strategies often lead to interconnected primary and secondary effects on observed activities and travel, realized through a sequence of rescheduling decisions over time and space and across household members. These results suggest that an explicit accounting of rescheduling decision sequences in forecasting models would enhance their behavioral validity and accuracy.

Integrated land-use and transportation models : behavioural foundations

Introduction. (M.E.H. Lee-Gosselin, S.T. Doherty). Section I: Conceptual Issues and Approaches. A Dynamic Understanding of Travel Demand: A Sketch. (K.W. Axhausen). Propositions for Modelling Household Decision-Making. (E.J. Miller). Operationalising Household Activity Scheduling Models: Addressing Assumptions and the Use of New Sources of Behavioural Data. (M.J. Roorda, S.T. Doherty, E.J. Miller). Conceptual Perspectives for Explaining Spatio-Temporal Behaviour in Urban Areas. (T. Ramadier, M.E.H. Lee-Gosselin, A. Frenette). Section II: Key Behavioural Components and Related Data Needs. Measuring Activity and Action Space/Time: Are Our Methods Keeping Pace with Evolving Behaviour Patterns? (T.M. McCray, M.E.H. Lee-Gosselin, Mei-Po Kwan). Modelling Learning and Adaptation in Route and Departure Time Choice Behaviour: Achievements and Prospects. (A. Jotisankasa, J.W. Polak). The Influence of Mobile and Immobile Communications on Activity and Travel Scheduling. (A.J. Richardson, R.K. Seethaler). The Creation of Simulated Household Travel Survey Data Based on Available Demographic Data from Households. (P. Stopher, J. Rose, P. Bullock). Section III: Operational Modelling Issues and Advances. GIS, Objects and Integrated Urban Models. (R.N. Buliung, P.S. Kanaroglou, H. Maoh). A Distributed Computing Approach for Transportation Modelling and Simulation: Application to an Airport System. (C. Ray, C. Claramunt). Design and Implementation of PECAS: a Generalised System for Allocating Economic Production, Exchange and Consumption Quantities (J.D. Hunt, J.E. Abraham). Hybrid Choice Models with Logit Kernel: Applicability to Large Scale Models. (D. Bolduc, M. Ben-Akiva, J. Walker, A. Michaud).

Standardized procedures for personal travel surveys

Over the past 40 years, significant resources have been spent on collecting data for transportation planning. Often transportation agency staff and their consultants struggle with the difficulties of collecting and analyzing the survey data. The transportation planning and data communities have become increasingly concerned about declining response rates and potential sample biases in transportation surveys. Resources are potentially wasted because standards are lacking in both survey methods and assessment procedures. This report contains an assessment of the aspects of personal travel surveys that could be standardized, resulting in improvements to the quality, consistency, and accuracy of the resulting data. The results of this research will be useful to transportation practitioners in state departments of transportation (DOTs) and in Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) for preparing statistically sound data collection and management programs.

Disaggregated Empirical Analysis of Determinants of Urban Travel Greenhouse Gas Emissions

A disaggregate approach is proposed for estimating travel-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the individual level by using an in-depth multiday activity-based survey in Quebec City, Canada. A random-effect model is then estimated to quantify the impact on emissions of individual and household socioeconomic characteristics as well as urban form and transit supply indicators. The model results are obtained in terms of total individual emissions and by trip-end activity purpose such as work, leisure, and shopping. According to the results, female respondents produced, on average, emissions that were 22% lower than those of men. Evidence of economies of scale was found within households in the production of travel GHG emissions. A couple would produce only 64% more emissions than a single person. It was found that both urban form and transit supply around the residence have a significant impact on GHG emissions, though this impact is relatively limited; this finding implies that drastic land use changes would be required to significantly cut travel emissions. For example, a 10% increase over the mean in residential or job density would lower emissions by less than 2%. This result is consistent with recent studies examining the relationship between travel and land use.

Keeping up with a Changing World: Challenges in the Design of Transport Survey Methods

Abstract At the 2008 International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Annecy, France, transport survey methodologists and practitioners shared their experience with keeping abreast of the data needs of a rapidly changing world. Over the past decade, this has translated into the need for: an expanded travel survey toolkit; methodological innovation for surveys of freight and public transport operations; a growing use of data collection and processing technologies; a need to align surveys with other data streams; and an increased interest in the comparability of international datasets on personal travel and commodity movements in an era of globalisation. We discuss how these guided the choice and scope of the five themes around which both the Annecy Conference and this book were organised.

Transport Survey Methods: Best Practice for Decision Making: Best Practice for Decision Making

This book provides an international perspective on improving information to support transportation decision making. It comprises a selection of papers plus workshop syntheses from the 9th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Chile in November 2011. The conference was organized into 14 workshops with both paper presentations and discussions in the workshops forming the majority of the conference activity. The papers reported primarily on research pertaining to continuous improvement in transport survey methods — the backbone of the transportation data pipeline in most countries. But some papers also addressed the new ways in which innovation — notably technological innovation — is being applied to the capture and analysis of data to produce necessary information faster, better, and less expensively. The conference program built on a rich legacy of intellectual pursuits spanning the past two decades, and it is anticipated that the conference will continue into the future. Thus, the contents of this book represent a 5–10 year view through a moving window on the international state of the practice and concerns in transport survey methods.

Transport Surveys: Considerations for Decision Makers and Decision Making

Abstract This book provides an international perspective on improving information to support transportation decision making. It comprises a selection of papers plus workshop syntheses from the 9th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Chile in November 2011. The conference was organized into 14 workshops with both paper presentations and discussions in the workshops forming the majority of the conference activity. The papers reported primarily on research pertaining to continuous improvement in transport survey methods — the backbone of the transportation data pipeline in most countries. But some papers also addressed the new ways in which innovation — notably technological innovation — is being applied to the capture and analysis of data to produce necessary information faster, better, and less expensively. The conference program built on a rich legacy of intellectual pursuits spanning the past two decades, and it is anticipated that the conference will continue into the future. Thus, the contents of this book represent a 5–10 year view through a moving window on the international state of the practice and concerns in transport survey methods.