FTA\u27S SUBURBAN MOBILITY SEMINARS: THE EDUCATION PROCESS

The Federal Transit Administration\u27s response to the suburban congestion problem is through the suburban mobility initiative which targeted local areas with 6 different types of assistance: short term planning grants; strategic planning grants; technical support; employer/developer demonstrations; organizational arrangements; and outreach. The latter included 40 seminars to discuss suburban traffic issues and lay the groundwork for implementation of the other elements of the program. After the initiative had been in operation for more than 2 years, the program was evaluated, the first being the seminar portion of the outreach program. The seminar had two objectives: raise awareness of the congestion problem and its magnitude; raise awareness of the FTA program. The evaluation of the success of the seminar in accomplishing these objectives is described. The seminars were found to have achieved their objectives. The article also notes five lessons for areas concerned with mobility issues

UPGRADING TRAVEL-DEMAND FORECASTING CAPABILITIES

In 1993, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency established the Travel Model Improvement Program (TMIP) to address the shortcomings of travel-forecasting procedures that were developed 30 years ago. The program pursues six tracks of activity: outreach, near-term improvements, long-term improvements, data needs, land use, and freight. This feature presents descriptions of each TMIP track and provides examples of projects funded by TMIP, which are at various stages of completion. During the early phase of TMIP, the focus was on designing and setting a general direction. Approximately 4 years ago, the focus began to shift toward product development and testing. The program, which has involved the user community and is structured to meet both near-term and long-term needs, will continue to be oriented toward meeting the needs of state governments and metropolitan planning organizations. In the future, its primary emphasis will be on product delivery and implementation. A list of TMIP contacts is provided for up-to-date information on specific projects

Calibrating urban residential models 1: procedures and strategies

Calibration of urban residential models has long been an area of confusion and apprehension for prospective model users. With the evolution of entropy-maximizing model formulations there has been new progress made toward resolving the calibration problem. Most of this progress has assumed the availability of spatial-interaction data (the T ij matrix). Many situations arise where singly constrained models are to be calibrated, for example, residential- or retail-location models, in the absence of this data. This paper describes a method which has been successfully used for calibrating urban residential models of such a type.

A model of shopping center location

The purpose of this paper is to present a model of retail employment which includes planned shopping centers in the employment-allocation function. The differences between planned shopping centers and unplanned areas are explored. The model to project retail employment is presented. Multiple sources of demand are allowed and an equilibrium between employment and demand is assumed. A procedure to locate additional planned shopping-center areas is derived. The calibration procedure involves a hill-climbing algorithm, a criterion function, and the partial derivatives of the allocation function. Calibration results indicate a good parameter fit and support the hypothesis that planned shopping centers attract retail employment.