Development of a Paratransit Microsimulation Patron Accessibility Analysis Tool for Small and Medium Sized Communities

ABSTRACT Paratransit is a critical form of transportation for mobility-impaired, low income, and small/ medium sized communities. Paratransit systems face many challenges that restrict how well they can serve their community, including limited funding, aging fleets, limited to no level of service standard assessments, and few practical modeling/planning practices. This paper discusses a transferable paratransit microsimulation patron accessibility analysis tool designed to address these challenges. The tool calculates paratransit patron accessibility (defined as paratransit patrons' perceived ease of access to reach desired activities and destinations) by simulating and measuring daily paratransit patron travel patterns based on service fleet and region information. The tool further allows providers to evaluate patron accessibility for any combination of population groups, travel purposes, and times of day. Transit providers can use the tool to determine how well paratransit patrons are served and the most efficient ways to improve service. The microsimulation framework, including the system of simulation models, the supporting data, and application to Brownsville, Texas are described in detail. LaMondia and Bhat

An annual time use model for vacation travel

Vacation travel constitutes about 25% of all long-distance travel, and about 80% of this vacation travel is undertaken using the automobile. This paper contributes to the vacation travel literature by examining how households decide what vacation travel activities to participate in on an annual basis, and to what extent, given the total annual vacation travel time that is available at their disposal. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive modelling exercise in the literature to undertake such a vacation travel time-use analysis to examine purpose-specific time investments. A mixed multiple discrete-continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model structure that is consistent with the notion of “optimal arousal” in vacation type time-use decisions is used in the analysis. The data used is drawn from the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS). The empirical results show that most households participate in different types of vacation travel over the course of a year, and they spend significantly different amounts of time on each type of vacation travel. The model developed here can be used to predict the changes in vacation travel timeuse patterns due to the changes in demographic, economic, and residence characteristics over time. Such predictions, in turn, can be used to examine the changing vacation travel needs of households, so that appropriate service and transportation facilities may be planned

Advancing Understanding of Long-Distance and Intercity Travel with Diverse Data Sources

Long-distance travel is an ambiguous designation that is used to refer to an extremely diverse set of trips, differing from one another in mode, distance, and purpose. Long-distance travel encompasses everything from short long-distance surface trips between adjacent metropolitan areas through intercontinental air trips spanning thousands of miles. These trips serve a wide range of purposes including business travel, leisure travel, and travel to access essential services such as medical care. As such, long-distance travel is increasingly important for sustainable transportation planning both due to the environmental externalities associated with these trips and also because the benefits of access to long-distance travel are inequitably distributed throughout the population. This project drew on five survey datasets, a mobiledevice based dataset from AirSage Inc., and semi-structured interviews to address research questions related to how best to measure long-distance travel, how long-distance travel influences well-being, and how access to long-distance travel varies among socio-demographic groups. Adequately defining long-distance travel for data collection and modeling remains a challenge and long-distance travel behavior researchers are continuing to experiment with innovative data collection methods for measuring these trips. It is clear that the most common current long-distance data collection methods are suboptimal. Distance thresholds, such as trips over 50 or 75 miles, are a poor method for defining long-distance travel on a national or global scale and there is no consensus on the appropriate recall period for retrospective long-distance travel surveys. Several promising avenues for future research and data collection were identified through this project. Focusing on more memorable long-distance travel indicators within surveys, such as overnight trips, trips including air travel, or an individual\u27s maximum distance from home, may reduce recall error and provide useful outcome measures for assessing individuals\u27 overall long-distance travel tendencies. Project results indicated that expanded use of convenience samples may provide more cost-effective opportunities to measure long-distance trip length and destination distributions. Social network characteristics may be predictive of certain types of long-distance travel and additional methodological improvements are needed to understand how to more effectively collect social network information including network geography. Analysis of survey data in this project suggested that one-time, self-assessed travel frequency estimates (a common existing measure of longdistance travel) can provide only a crude approximation of the levels of long-distance travel and that self-assessment is most effective for identifying non-travelers and very infrequent travelers. Historically, transportation equity research has focused on access to local goods and services but access to long-distance travel and to more distant destinations is increasingly important for maintaining social networks and accessing economic opportunities and specialized services. Across multiple datasets in this project, there is ample evidence that lower-income individuals engage in less long-distance travel and have more unmet long-distance travel needs than their higher-income counterparts. Given both the theoretical and empirical evidence that longdistance and intercity travel is correlated with an individuals’ own sense of well-being, especially for leisure or personal purposes, inequitable access to long-distance travel cannot be ignored. This finding suggests generally that lack of equity in long-distance access has been masked by lack of data and is a policy concern that must be considered in sustainable transportation planning moving forward

A Conceptual and Methodological Framework of Leisure Activity Loyalty Accommodating the Travel Context

At the time of publication J.J. LaMondia was at Auburn University and C.R. Bhat was at the University of Texas at Austin.As leisure travel continues to grow, it has become a critical subject for planners and decisionmakers since it significantly impacts regional economic and social development as well as contributes to emission levels and congestion. Despite being a significant percentage of our travel, however, leisure travel behavior is still not very well understood. The goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of leisure activity participation by considering leisure activity loyalty within the travel context. In particular, this study focuses on one specific dimension of travel context: travel extent (i.e. whether an individual participates in a leisure activity on a daily versus a long-distance basis). As such, this paper first introduces a unified conceptual framework for measuring leisure activity loyalties within a travel context, based on two distinct dynamics of leisure loyalty behavior - destination attachment and activity involvement. Additionally, this paper uses a unique 2001 NHTS dataset comprised of households’ daily and long-distance leisure activities to undertake a unique empirical analysis of five distinct leisure activities using the conceptual framework and a copula-based model methodology. The findings confirmed that households demonstrate significant loyalties to travel contexts across all leisure activities, especially resting and sightseeing.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin