Traffic Zones Reconsidered: A Geographical Examination of Zonal Restructuring for System-Wide Mass Transit Ridership Forecasting

摘要

One of the major problems encountered in urban mass transit ridership forecasting is that existing traffic zone systems are not compatible with the service areas of transit routes. Existing traffic zone boundaries rarely coincide with those of service corridors. This inconsistency can lead to erroneous ridership estimates. The current study attempts to restructure the zone system to account for passenger accessibility in system-wide transit ridership forecasts. The study identifies and addresses three major problems to overcome in zonal restructuring: (1) the development of an efficient zone construction algorithm; (2) the efficient transfer of data from the traffic zone system into the transit zone system; and (3) the minimization of modifications to the overall modeling process for all modes of travel. An automated zone reconstruction procedure was developed to build an alternative zone system by overlaying service corridors over the existing traffic analysis zones. This procedure provides data for mode split and trip assignment, where weighted disutilities are calculated for mode split and trips are allocated to and from individual subzones during trip assignment.