Improved Travel Demand Modeling with Synthetic Populations

We compare synthetic population-based travel demand modeling with the state of the art travel demand models used by metropolitan planning offices in the United States. Our comparison of the models for three US cities shows that synthetic population-based models match the state of the art models closely for the temporal trip distributions and the spatial distribution of destinations. The advantages of the synthetic population-based method are that it provides greater spatial resolution, can be generalized to any region, and can be used for studying correlations with demographics and activity types, which are useful for modeling the effects of policy changes.