Enriching Travel Demand Forecasting Models with a Household Typology

Abstract

In the Québec province, in Canada, travel demand forecasting relies mainly on individual characteristics, whereas it appears that individual mobility behaviors also significantly depend on the attributes of relatives and people who live in the same household. This paper aims to better understand the interactions between the household structure and individual mobility behavior, as well as the effects of the age and life cycle of individuals and their relatives on individual trips. Considering that personal mobility is dependent on household attributes, a household typology is proposed to be included in the travel demand forecasting approach, which is initiated with large-scale household travel surveys. An allocation model of the people to a household type completes the process, so that in the future, transport demand could be predicted considering the person herself as well as her household type.

Measuring Changes in Multimodal Travel Behavior Resulting from Transport Supply Improvement

“…The results on the typology of households are reported in Figure 4 (representing the households according to the average age and the maximum age amplitude of their members, the color indicating the HoTy to which the household belongs) and Table 1 (centers, therefore, average household variables by HoTy). Each HoTy was given a meaningful name—the same as in a previous paper ( 24 ). There are three HoTys of one-generation household (“young couples, roommates, or singles,”“people in their fifties,” and “retirees”); four types of two-generation household composed of parents and children (“very young families,”“young families,” and “traditional families”) or of “adults and seniors”; and one type of three-generation household (“multi-generational families”).…”

“…For the household typology, the method developed in a previous paper was used ( 24 ). The households were segmented applying again a K-means algorithm based on the following attributes:…”

Impact of the Geographic Resolution on Population Synthesis Quality

“…As the mobility behaviors are determined both by people and households' characteristics [16][17][18], multilevel synthesizers are proposed. The multilevel synthesizers try to fit both households and people distributions by reweighting households according to their compositions of individuals [15].…”