Parsimonious Modeling and Uncertainty Quantification for Transportation Systems Planning Applied to California High-Speed Rail

This paper presents a parsimonious travel demand model (PTDM) derived from a proprietary parent travel demand model developed by Cambridge Systematics (CS) for the California high-speed rail system. The purpose of the PTDM is to reduce computational expense for model simulations, optimization and sensitivity analyses, and other repetitive analyses. The PTDM is used to quantify the significance of parameter uncertainties with the use of mean value first-order second moment methods for uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. The PTDM changes the model resolution of the parent travel demand model from a traffic analysis zone to a county-level analysis. The three-step model contains trip frequency, destination choice, and main mode choice models and is calibrated to match the results of the CS model. The main mode choice model predicts primary mode choice results for car, commercial air, conventional rail, and high-speed rail. The PTDM uses data and models similar to parent models to show how uncertainty in travel demand model predictions can be quantified. This paper does not attempt to assess the reliability of parent model forecasts, and the results should not be used to evaluate uncertainty in the California High-Speed Rail Authority's rider ship and revenue forecasts. However, the uncertainty quantification methodology presented here, when applied to the CS model, can be used to quantify the impact of parameter uncertainty on the forecast results.