Development of a Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool

There is growing support for improvements to the quality of the walking environment, including more investments to promote pedestrian travel. Planners, engineers and others seek improved tools to estimate the level of pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at the appropriate scale to aid policy-relevant issues like air quality, public health, and the smart allocation of infrastructure and other resources. To this end, a previous OTREC-funded project "Improving the Representation of the Pedestrian Environment in Travel Demand Models" developed a robust pedestrian planning method for use in regional travel demand models. Utilizing a new measure of…

There is growing support for improvements to the quality of the walking environment, including more investments to promote pedestrian travel. Planners, engineers and others seek improved tools to estimate the level of pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at the appropriate scale to aid policy-relevant issues like air quality, public health, and the smart allocation of infrastructure and other resources. To this end, a previous OTREC-funded project “Improving the Representation of the Pedestrian Environment in Travel Demand Models” developed a robust pedestrian planning method for use in regional travel demand models. Utilizing a new measure of the pedestrian environment and a micro-level unit of analysis, the number of walking trips generated can be predicted with spatial acuity. This project aims to build upon the successes of this previous project and extend the functionality of this tool, which will expand its utility to users beyond the travel demand modeling community to other pedestrian planning stakeholders.

Specifically, this project will incorporate a means to predict the distribution of walking trips generated (from the previously developed method) to destinations, at the same micro-level spatial-scale. This method will be sensitive to the characteristics of the environment and socioeconomics of the pedestrian. The approach will then identify the spatial extent of the potential pedestrian paths to these destinations. While the method will not assign pedestrian trips to a network, it will identify the areas where pedestrians are likely to traverse as they travel from trip origins to destinations. The research design will utilize existing data resources from recent regional household travel surveys, pedestrian count data, and the wealth of detailed, spatially differentiated environmental data available throughout the Portland region. These methods will then be integrated with the products developed from the previous research and assembled to provide a stand-alone tool to estimate various aspects of pedestrian demand, including: trip generation, trip distribution, and areas of potential pedestrian activity. This tool will increase the arsenal of analytical methods available for regional demand modeling as well as pedestrian and safety analysis, health assessments and other pedestrian planning applications. This project is a continuing partnership between the Oregon Modeling Collaborative and Metro.