01557458

Component

Ridership forecasting for high-speed rail (HSR) systems is a contentious issue because significant ridership overestimation has been observed in several HSR systems worldwide. This condition has resulted in severe financial difficulties for their long-term operations. This study uses the Taiwan HSR (THSR) data collected since the start of its operations in 2007 to revisit THSR planning and its associated approaches used for ridership forecasting, seeking to identify the likely factors that lead to the gap between the forecasted and actual ridership. A forecast framework is then proposed that consists of a direct travel demand prediction model and a mode split model that are constructed with regard to several methodological aspects identified from the revisit. The models are estimated using historical aggregate data before THSR operation, which affords the feasibility and easiness in practice. Forecasting result is approximately 10% from the actual ridership and can be viewed as an evident improvement from previous forecasts. This result also highlights that the prediction of the induced travel demand, which accounts for approximately one-third of the forecasted ridership in the previous approaches, can be a major source of overestimation

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR010 Intercity Passenger Rail.

01550057

15-4175

English

17p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Data analysis; Forecasting; High speed rail; Ridership; Transportation planning; Travel demand

Taiwan

Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Railroads; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-4175

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:22PM