Abstract:
Coefficients for work, shopping, and school trip generation models are presented for Mexico City, Mexico. These results were generated for the first stage of a four-stage model that was built for the city for 1994, the most recent year for which data are available. Because no complete urban transportation model that incorporated behavioral aspects of urban travel could be found at the time of this study, these estimates are the first results of their kind to be published in the literature for recent years. Attempts to account for spatial processes have not been undertaken as a general rule in transportation modeling. Therefore, there is a bias in coefficients estimated without taking spatial autocorrelation into account when spatially defined data are used. To address this peculiarity, spatial regression was used instead of the traditional ordinary least-squares estimation method. Trip generation is normally defined on a per capita or per household basis. Surprisingly, these results show that models specified for trip generation densities (trips per unit of area) were as good as or better than more traditional specifications in explaining trip generation. The implication of these findings could potentially be of importance in other cities.
