Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) Activity-Based Travel Model Peer Review Report

4.0 Regional Transportation Model Improvement Plan

To overcome the limitations of the existing trip-based model and to support the agency's Long-Range Transportation goals and objectives, the Model Development Working Group, which is comprised of technical staff from the state, regional, and local agencies, prepared a 10-year model development and enhancement plan, commonly referred to by the agency as the "model development blueprint." The Working Group was responsible for prioritizing regional policies of interest and identifying corresponding travel demand model(s). The Working Group's findings are summarized in Table 4‑1. As can be observed from the table, an activity-based travel demand model will be able to accommodate most of the policies that are of high priority to the agency. Thus, the Group ranked the development of an activity-based model for the Baltimore region as a high priority. The Group also identified several other models, such as a dynamic highway traffic flow model, external models, and a vehicle evolution model, as high priority models as well (see

Table 4‑2 for BMC's model development priority list).

Table 4‑1: Summary of BMC's Model Enhancement Need and Existing Tool Capacity

Table 4‑2: BMC's Model Development Priority

i: Model to capture personal travel demand

ii: Models to capture travel demand for movement of goods and services

iii: Models to capture flow of traffic on transportation network

iv: Models to capture interactions between all components of travel system

4.1 Analytical Needs for ABM Model

In August 2013, soon after the initiation of the ABM development process, the agency organized a model design workshop for the state and local agency planning partners. The workshop helped the stakeholders and consultants identify and understand unique socio-economic and transportation attributes that are specific to the Baltimore region and must be considered in the eventual model design. In particular, the workshop identified a number of emerging trends and scenarios and corresponding policies and strategies, summarized in Table 4‑3, that should be considered in the design and specification of the activity-based model currently under development.

Table 4‑3: Desired Technical Capability of the Proposed ABM Model System

4.2 Data Collection Plan

The base year for the proposed activity-based model is 2012. The agency undertook a household travel survey in 2007-2008 that will be used for model estimation and validation. The datasets listed in Table 4‑4 will be used for additional model calibration, validation, and back-casting exercises. The agency is currently not engaged in any data collection effort, though updating transit information with data from a more recent transit on-board survey is under consideration.

Table 4‑4: List of Observed Data and Usage Plan for the Development of Activity-Based Model