On the second day of the meeting the peer review panel spent about one hour in an executive session, closed to all other participants of the meeting. The reason for this closed session was to allow panel members to speak freely and openly among themselves while developing formal recommendations. This section details those panel recommendations.
The panel provided three options for the new BKR model:
The panel also had other general comments and recommendations.
The panel does think the enhanced/hybrid trip-based model that was discussed during the meeting is a reasonable approach to improve the traditional trip-based model. However, they had concerns that the integration with PSRC’s ABM would be unnecessarily complicated, and thus suggested they create a stand-alone model that does not integrate with PSRC’s ABM at all.
The panel did have several concerns with the enhanced/hybrid trip-based model that suggested that the model may not be the optimal option for BKR:
If BKR is not ready to move to an ABM but may be in a few years once PSRC’s ABM has been in use for a longer period of time, then a viable option would be to incrementally improve their existing trip-based model by adding components of interest. For example, BKR could add a bicycle component or add accessibility variables to the existing model.
The panel acknowledges there are concerns with adopting PSRC’s ABM such as simulation variation, increased complexity with setting up and maintaining an ABM compared to a traditional trip-based model, unfamiliarity with ABM, and higher run times. However, all of the panel members believe all of those issues can be managed or overcome, especially with PSRC’s support. They all agree that an ABM will be the most sensitive to the policy scenarios that BKR wants to analyze, compared to the other model options. Given the existence of PSRC’s ABM that covers the same region as the BKR modeling area, most of the panel members believe adapting PSRC’s ABM will be cheaper and quicker than developing a new model from scratch.
The peer review panel made additional comments and recommendations to BKR, irrespective of the model chosen. They highlighted that data concerns are paramount for all model types. In addition, the panel supports making the BKR regional boundary smaller than the PSRC region. The panel suggested that to aid in the decision-making process BKR should develop a scope-of-work and budget for each of the three approaches that includes an analysis of the costs, concerns, and benefits of each modeling option.
