Regional passenger demand forecasting
Vincent Benezech, James Ramsey & Michael Doggett
Veitch Lister Consulting & Transport for NSW, New South Wales
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ABSTRACT
VLC recently led the development of a new Regional Transport Model (RTM) for Transport for NSW (TfNSW) to support the NSW Government’s faster rail strategy and provide inputs to future business cases for the faster rail corridors.
The RTM allows the NSW Government to assess passenger rail, road and air projects that affect travel in regional areas beyond the scope of existing urban models. It is being used right now to understand demand and the economic feasibility of proposed faster rail corridors and the broader rail network envisaged in the NSW Government’s strategy.
The model is the first of its kind in NSW. Up until now, data limitations on trip origins and destinations have meant that building a model to understand travel in regional NSW has been prohibitive. To overcome this and build the RTM we utilised telephone company (Telco) data from mobile phones to get information on where people travel. To overcome some of the limitations of the Telco data (lack of information on mode choice, trip purposes) it was “fused” with other more conventional existing data sources: Journey to Work (census), Household travel survey (HTS), and visitor surveys.
The RTM is multimodal. It models (mechanised) car, rail, air, and coach trips across the whole of NSW and ACT. In addition to modelling the traditional impacts of land use on travel demand, it also models the feedback from accessibility on land use development with land use / transport interaction (LUTI) effects.
With the renewed focus on transport infrastructure in the regions, and a possible surge in regional and hinterland populations due a step change in remote working, tools like the RTM are needed to help plan for growth and prosperity in Australia’s regions.
Author(s)
Vincent Benezech | VLC
Vincent is a Principal Consultant (Transport Advisory) at VLC's Sydney office.
Vincent has 9 years’ experience applying modelling and data analysis techniques to a wide range of transport policy and economic issues, from the cost-benefit appraisal of high-speed rail lines in France to the assessment of CO2 emissions globally. His technical expertise covers demand forecasting, econometrics, data analytics and data visualisation.
Prior to joining VLC, Vincent worked as a manager at BDO Advisory in France, and as a policy analyst at the International Transport Forum at the OECD in Paris.
Michael Doggett | TfNSW
Michael Doggett is Manager for Rail Demand and Operations Assessment in Strategic Rail at Transport for NSW.
James Ramsey | VLC
James is a Senior Consultant (Transport Modelling) at Veitch Lister Consulting’s Sydney office. James has over nine years of experience working in transport consulting in Australia and Europe (Sweden & UK). He has held senior roles within a broad range of transport modelling, demand forecasting, data analysis and transport economics projects. Examples include leading the recalibration of the Tbilisi (Georgia) transport model, a bigdata-driven study on the efficiencies of night-time freight in Stockholm, and choice modelling / demand forecasting for high-speed rail between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
