Dynamic Choice Model of Urban Commercial Activity Patterns of Vehicles and People

Intraurban commercial vehicle travel is a relatively underdeveloped aspect of urban travel demand modeling despite the large share of the weekday traffic stream represented by commercial movements. One problem is the proprietary nature of these data and the corresponding lack of behavioral understanding of how establishments schedule their trips. Even when such data have been made available, such as through establishment travel surveys, the large variation in firm size, commodities and services, and logistics practices makes it difficult to create a generalized decision framework. This work uses establishment survey data collected by the Ohio Department of Transportation to create an intraurban commercial vehicle model to be run in a disaggregate microsimulation environment and focuses on commercial movement patterns. The model generates entire daily patterns for workers who regularly travel as part of their jobs and creates tours through a dynamic choice process that incrementally builds tours, taking into consideration elapsed time and time of day in next-stop purpose and location choices. Activity durations are embedded in the utility equations of “stay” alternatives and provide internal consistency between the dimensions of activity purpose, duration, time of day, and location. Model formulation and estimation results are presented for the dynamic activity choice model component. The model system can reproduce observed commercial travel patterns found in the survey data and provide intuitively plausible interpretations for commercial travel behavior in the absence of more detailed knowledge of individual and firm operations.