The over congestion of our transport network is a major political, social and environmental issue. For this reason Modal Choice (the choice of which mode of transport to use for a journey) is a key transport issue. A major objective for transport planners is to motivate more people to use public transport rather than use their car. Visual-TM provides the mechanism for calculating the “Mode Split” and therefore applying network hypotheses to test different methods of encouraging people to use public transport.
When conducting a Mode Choice exercise there are four key elements for discussion.
Skims – a skim is a matrix containing an attribute. There is one matrix for each attribute for each mode, i.e. 2 modes, 7 attributes = 14 skims. These provide the attributes for each o-d movement.
Utility Function Coefficients – these multiply the attribute to form the utility function.
Trip Matrix – this holds the number of trips by all modes between each origin and destination.
Disaggregate Modelling (Trip Level)
Sample Enumeration
Each of these will now be discussed in turn in the following sections:
The concept of mode choice modelling is discussed in the Mode Choice Concept section