Technion, Israel
April 20, 2015, 11:00, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
Activity-based models are the new generation of travel demand models. These models treat travel as being derived from the demand for personal activities. The explicit modelling of activities and the consequent tours and trips enables a better understanding of travel behaviour and more credible analysis of response to policies and their effect on traffic and air quality. These models have various advantages in support of transport project evaluation by being able to provide detailed disaggregate individual and vehicle activity output that can improve our analysis of emissions and provide various accessibility measures important for equity and other economic evaluation. This presentation will demonstrate these various advantages for policy-making and discuss future challenges in using these models to forecast the impact of new transportation services and technologies promoting sustainable.
Yoram Shiftan is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Technion, where he teaches and conducts research in travel behavior with a focus on activity-based modeling and response to policies, the complex relationships between transport, the environment and land use, transport economics and project evaluation. Prof. Shiftan is the editor of Transport Policy and the chair of the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR). He is the co-chair of the Network on European Communications and Transport Activities Research (NECTAR) cluster on Environment and Policy, member of the World Conference Transportation Research (WCTR) scientific committee, and chair of its Transport Security Special Interest Group. Prof. Shiftan received his Ph.D. from MIT and since then has published dozens of papers and co-edited the books "Transportation Planning" in the series of Classics in Planning, and "Transition towards Sustainable Mobility, The Role of Instruments, Individuals and Institutions."