Abstract
This research assesses the implications of existing trends on future network investment, comparing alternative scenarios concerning budgets and investment rules. The main scenarios compare “stated decision rules”, processes encoded in flowcharts and weights developed from official documents or by discussion with agency staff, with “revealed decision rules”, weights estimated statistically based on observed historical behavior. This research specifies the processes necessary to run the network forecasting models with various decision rules. We find that given the relatively small amount of funds available for network growth in a mature system, alternative decision rules make only small differences in overall system performance, though they direct investments to very different locations and affect the trip time and spatial accessibility in a significantly different way.
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Notes
The original transportation planning network provided by the Metropolitan Council comprises 20,380 links, 7,723 nodes, 1,165 transportation analysis zones (TAZs) in the seven-county Metro Area, and 35 external stations. The planning network was modified to accommodate potential but unbuilt links, in particular what we call legacy links (projects that are in old transportation plans from the 1960s but that have not yet been constructed). The general idea is that if a legacy link intersects an existing link, there is a creation of a new node and the old link is divided into two different links. In the revised network representation there are 20,398 links and 7,733 nodes.
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This material is based in part upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0236396. This research was also supported by the Minnesota Department of Transportation research project “Beyond Business as Usual: Ensuring the Network We Want is the Network We Get”.
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Levinson, D., Xie, F. & Oca, N.M. Forecasting and Evaluating Network Growth. Netw Spat Econ 12, 239–262 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-009-9113-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-009-9113-z