Forecasting Travel in Urban America

A history of urban travel demand modeling (UTDM) and its enormous influence on American life from the 1920s to the present.

For better and worse, the automobile has been an integral part of the American way of life for decades. Its ascendance would have been far less spectacular, however, had engineers and planners not devised urban travel demand modeling (UTDM). This book tells the story of this irreplaceable engineering tool that has helped cities accommodate continuous rise in traffic from the 1950s on. Beginning with UTDM’s origins as a method to help plan new infrastructure, Konstantinos Chatzis follows its trajectory through new generations of models that helped make optimal use of existing capacity and examines related policy instruments, including the recent use of intelligent transportation systems.

Chatzis investigates these models as evolving entities involving humans and nonhumans that were shaped through a specific production process. In surveying the various generations of UTDM, he delves into various means of production (from tabulating machines to software packages) and travel survey methods (from personal interviews to GPS tracking devices and smartphones) used to obtain critical information. He also looks at the individuals who have collectively built a distinct UTDM social world by displaying specialized knowledge, developing specific skills, and performing various tasks and functions, and by communicating, interacting, and even competing with one another.

Original and refreshingly accessible, Forecasting Travel in Urban America offers the first detailed history behind the thinkers and processes that impact the lives of millions of city dwellers every day.Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
I The Emergence, Development, and Rise to Prominence of the Four-Step Model, Interwar Years--1960s
1 Counting and Forecasting Traffic in the Interwar Years 27
2 The Aggregate and Zone-Based Four-Step Model Takes Center Stage 45
II Giving the Four-Step Model a New Lease on Life, 1970s and 1980s 
3 Travelers Are Utility-Maximizing Rational Individuals 93
4 Seeking Equilibrium on the Transportation Network 123
III Urban Travel Demand Modeling Enters the Post-Four-Step Model Era, 1990s-2010s 
5 Traffic Forecasting's Attempted Manhattan Project 149
6 Travelers Are Social Beings 175
7 Modeling Variable Flows, and the (Probable) End of an Era 203
Conclusion 229
Notes 251
Index 385“This text represents an outstanding research effort.”
—Choice Reviews

“Forecasting Travel in Urban America represents an important contribution to the history of the—often little-noticed—foundations of mobility.”
—Technology and Culture

“Chatzis’s text is a well-documented resource for students and modelers looking to find ways to make an impact in the field. As society faces multiple grand challenges of growing frequency and severity across social, environmental, economic, and public health domains, Chatzis’s chronological history of the development of transportation demand models reveals both new and age-old challenges in modeling people’s behavior and responses to changes in the transportation system and land development.”
—Journal of the American Planning Association“This book provides a unique understanding of the history and life cycles of urban travel forecasting models, central to modern transportation planning worldwide. Modelers and non-modelers alike will find the personal and institutional histories in this book fascinating!”
—Daniel Brand, former Chair, Committee on Passenger Travel Demand Forecasting, Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences

“This fascinating book brings travel demand forecasting to life through the ideas, people, and projects that have propelled the discipline forward through the years. A valuable historical background for anyone who aspires to predict the evolution of social system behavior in an increasingly unpredictable world.”
—Mark Bradley, Principal, Resource Systems Group
 
“An interesting historical study of the social world of American urban travel demand modelling over seventy years, that highlights the interaction between theory and practice and the academicization of the field of urban traffic forecasting.”
—John Krige, Kranzberg Professor Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology


“In this pathbreaking book, Konstantinos Chatzis provides us with a long-awaited history of traffic modeling in America at the articulation of epistemology, political and social analysis. A historical analysis that is all the more welcome now that modeling has returned today as a key component of planning.”
—Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard University
Konstantinos Chatzis is Professor at École des Ponts ParisTech and a tenured researcher at the Université Gustave Eiffel.