Abstract
In many countries of the developing world, it is difficult to conduct large-scale household travel surveys to collect data for travel behaviour model estimation and application. This paper focuses on two candidate solutions to the problem: (1) developing models that can be applied for prediction using secondary data collected for other purposes and include socio-demographic information but do not include transport specific information such as the car and/or transit pass ownership (e.g. census, public health records, etc.), (2) ‘borrowing’ a model developed using data from a similar city within the same region. In the first approach, we investigate the feasibility of developing car trip generation models which imputes the car ownership variable with estimated car ownership propensities. The proposed framework is applied in two East African cities, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. The estimation results indicate that for both cities the proposed approach outperforms the models that exclude the car ownership variable. In the second approach, we investigate the spatial transferability of the models developed in the first approach between the two cities to evaluate if it is justified to apply models from one developing country to another in the absence of local models. Results indicate that though some of the estimated parameters are not significantly different from each other between the two cities, statistical tests do not support direct transferability of all the models from Nairobi to Dar-es-Salaam or vice versa. However, interestingly, the simpler model (which excludes car-ownership) outperforms the model with imputed car ownership propensity in terms of transferability. These findings provide useful insights into the development of trip generation models under data constraints which can practically be very useful for developing countries.
Highlights
In recent years, developing countries have witnessed speedy urbanisation, improvements in living standards and significant growths in economic activities
Positive parameter estimates imply that an increase in any of these explanatory variables increases the propensity of household car trip generation or ownership, while the reverse is true for negative parameter estimates
The other exceptions relate to the relative magnitudes of parameters associated with the number of workers per household, and the number of cars owned per household
Summary
In recent years, developing countries have witnessed speedy urbanisation, improvements in living standards and significant growths in economic activities. Given the important role of the trip generation component in transport planning, there has been numerous research studies investigating the relative contribution of different factors on trip generation [1, 15, 32, 38, 44]. These studies are conducted in the context of developed countries, and the findings as well as the methodologies are not directly applicable to developing countries due to substantial differences in the socio-economic conditions and data issues.
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