TABULATING DEMAND ELASTICITIES FOR URBAN TRAVEL FORECASTING

Abstract

This paper presents a compendium of demand elasticities in a tabulated form in order to facilitate urban travel forecasting. A number of elasticity estimates have been reported for a variety of cities over the past decade, but the scenarios or base conditions differ from one site to another. In order to systematically tabulate these disparate estimates, demand elasticities were pooled into four cells according to urban size (large versus medium) and urban structure (core-concentrated versus multinucleated). Such a classification has been verified to stratify cities into groups sharing common socioeconomic and travel patterns. Demand elasticities can be divided into two categories: empirical elasticities and calibrated elasticities. The former were measured in the field before and after notable incidents such as a fare increase in the transit system, while the latter were derived from demand models. The elasticities can be further identified as either aggregate or disaggregate depending on whether they are calculated from demand models. The elasticities can be further identified as either aggregate or disaggregate depending on whether they are calculated from areawide or subarea data. All these result in a collection of elasticities that have rather different values. This paper tries to explain some of these differences to gain insights into the general characteristics of elasticides for urban areas of different sizes and structures. The elasticity tabulation and the general properties of the elasticities provide both practitioners and researchers with factual information for estimating urban travel demand simply and systematically. /Authors/

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