BACKGROUND

In 1978, TRB published NCHRP Report 187: Quick-Response Urban Travel Estimation Techniques and Transferable Parameters. This report described default parameters, factors, and manual techniques for doing simple planning analysis. The report and its default data were used widely by the transportation planning profession for almost 20 years. In 1998, drawing on several newer data sources including the 1990 Census and National Personal Household Travel Survey, an update to NCHRP Report 187 was published in the form of NCHRP Report 365: Travel Estimation Techniques for Urban Planning.

Since NCHRP Report 365 was published, significant changes have occurred affecting the complexity, scope, and context of transportation planning. Planning concerns have grown beyond "urban" to include rural, statewide, and special-use lands. Transportation planning tools have evolved and proliferated, enabling improved and more flexible analyses to support decisions. The demands on transportation planning have expanded into special populations (e.g., tribal, immigrant, old, and young) and broader issues (e.g., safety, congestion, pricing, air quality, environment, and freight). In addition, the default data and parameters in NCHRP Report 365 need to be updated to reflect the planning requirements of today and the next 10 years.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research is to revise and update NCHRP Report 365 to reflect current travel characteristics and to provide guidance on travel demand forecasting procedures and their application for solving common transportation problems. The update will present, in a user-friendly guidebook format, a range of credible approaches to allow different users to determine the level of detail and sophistication in selecting modeling and analysis techniques most appropriate to their situations. The updated guidebook will address the application of simple, straight-forward techniques, optional use of default parameters, and appropriate references to other more sophisticated techniques. The guidebook will be sufficiently broad, yet detailed enough, to allow practitioners to use travel demand forecasting methods to address the full range of transportation planning issues (e.g., environmental, air quality, freight, multimodal, and other critical concerns).

March 2009:  An interim report was evaluated by the project panel in October 2008.  A revised interim report was submitted for panel review in May 2009.

Based on the expected availability of new data from the 2008 National Household Travel Survey, the project scheduled has been altered.  The final report is expected in July-August 2010.