Assessing Transportation Policy Using an Activity-based Microsimulation Model of Travel Demand

Travel demand models have been providing decision-support for transportation infrastructure planning over the past half-century. However, with limited opportunities for new highway and transit infrastructure in congested areas, “demand-oriented” policy measures (e.g. travel demand management), which allow for more efficient usage of existing road and transit capacity, require improved methods of analysis. This paper presents a new operational prototype microsimulation model of travel and activity scheduling for household agents (TASHA) that provides more precise model outputs than current state-of-practice models, with little increase in the supporting data requirements. It is argued that the model significantly improves our ability to analyze demand oriented policy measures. This paper uses several example transportation policy problems in Toronto to demonstrate the potential benefits of the TASHA modelling approach over current methods.