The effects of traffic zoning with regular geometric shapes on the precision of trip production models

Abstract

One of the first and most critical steps involved in transportation studies is to determine the traffic zoning scheme. A traffic analysis zone (TAZ) is the main unit of the transportation analysis. In most transportation planning studies, the focus is only on the modeling process, while ignoring aspects such as TAZ definition, configuration, and design. Although the definition of TAZs is one of the key stages in transportation planning studies, a proper approach for the definition is still one of the unsolved issues.In this research, a TAZ with regular geometric shapes, called regular traffic analysis zones (RTAZs), is presented as a new approach to traffic zoning. On the other hand, the accuracy of calculating trip production, as the first step of well-known 4-step transportation demand modeling system, is of high necessity, because this step determines the total number of trips. In the current study, the effects of RTAZs on the results of trip production models (TPMs) for the city of Khoy in Iran were investigated. The results indicated that TPMs based on regular zoning system acted almost similar to traditional zoning system in estimating produced trips and, in some cases, even presented relatively better estimations. Regarding the difficulties encountered in the topic of the traditional traffic zoning system, the present work showed that RTAZs facilitated the modeling process and led to time and cost savings.