Assessment of the behavioural responses in the Portuguese National Transport Model

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2009

Authors

Michiel de Bok (Author) FEUP; Pedro Abrantes (Author) FEUP; Álvaro Costa (Author) FEUP; Vera Ferreira (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: 1st Transatlantic NECTAR Conference

Pages: 1-13

NECTAR conference

Arlington, Virginia USA, 18-20 June, 2009

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology > Civil engineering

CORDIS: Technological sciences > Engineering > Civil engineering > Infrastructures engineering

Other information

Abstract (EN): The Portuguese National Transport Model (PoNTraM) represents the supply and demand of medium and long distance travel within the country. After initial development between 2006 and 2007, follow up research has recently got under way to significantly upgrade the demand model. The scope of PoNTraM is to evaluate transport measures that have a regional or national impact, such as the construction of a new national airport or a high speed rail link. It considers five modes relevant to long distance travel: car, bus, rail, taxi and high-speed rail, and the demand models are calibrated on a large-scale household survey. The model supports the decision making of transport network investments by providing passenger forecasts or highway link flow projections. By doing so it can be used to prioritise network development investments, which is increasingly important with the current pressure on available funds. This paper focuses on the validity of the demand projections by comparing the demand elasticities from the model with empirical studies in international literature. Demand elasticities can be used to describe the aggregate change in demand for a given mode subject to a certain change in its cost or travel attributes. Cross elasticities measure the change in demand for a given mode subject to changes in the attributes of competing modes. The elasticities implicit in the current model are derived from model runs for a number of elasticity scenarios. The comparison shows that the elasticities and cross elasticities for the conventional modes (car, rail and bus) are comparable to the elasticities found in literature, confirming the plausibility of the results. The results also show useful insight into the key areas for improvement; in particular the demand responses to changes in travel time and for high speed rail are not yet satisfactory requiring a revision of the mode choice model.

Language: Portuguese

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific