The Travel Modelling Group (TMG) held a workshop on mobility tools and services on the morning of February 5, 2020 in the ITS Lab, SF3103 at University of Toronto. The event drew invited guests as well as interested faculty and graduate students.
UTTRI Director Professor Eric Miller, also Research Director of TMG, commenced the event with a brief introduction of each speaker.
The first presentation of the workshop was given by James Vaughan, a senior software architect at UTTRI. Vaughan’s presentation “Modelling Driver’s Licences & Auto Ownership in GTA Model 4.1” focused on two new sub-models within GTAModel V4.1, an operational agent-based urban travel demand model currently used by many planning agencies in southern Ontario. The auto ownership and driver’s license models have enabled GTAModel an improved representation of the distribution of owned vehicles in future year scenarios. Focus was given to both the parameters of the models and their mathematical backgrounds.
Next, Francisco Calderón, a PhD candidate at University of Toronto spoke on “Modelling Mobility Service Provision.” The presentation summarized Francisco’s doctoral research work to date, which focuses on modelling emerging mobility services and their service provision processes in a holistic manner. The modelling scope pertains to large-scale agent-based model systems such as the GTA Model. Francisco’s work establishes a generic and flexible conceptual framework for modelling, allowing representation of a broad range of mobility services. Implementation-wise, a prototype model for a ride-hailing service was illustrated.
PhD candidate Gozde Ozonder next presented her research on “Uber vs. Taxi Usage: the Toronto VfH Case Study.” The study focusses on Uber and taxi demand-related analyses investigating the friction between the two services in the GTHA. The three main findings are:
- The latest regional travel survey (TTS2016) has successfully captured the trends observed in Uber’s data;
- Taxi usage (trip patterns, user attributes, etc.) has been very stable over a 20-year period between 1996 and 2016;
- Uber and taxi services had different user profiles in Fall 2016, where age and residential location of the individuals were the two most important factors that impacted the choice process. However, data unavailability associated with past behaviour, weekend trips and visitor/tourist trips impede the generalization of the results.
Professor Shauna Brail spoke after the morning break. She gave a talk on “Taking Canada for a Ride: Digital Ride-Hailing and Its Impact on Canadian Cities.” The main focus was the lack of accurate data collection faced in transportation planning. She presented comparative analyses of various cities to see how planners are overcoming such challenges in different parts of the world.
The workshop ended with Professor Eric Miller’s presentation “Preparing for Modelling CAVs.” He primarily echoed the importance of building a transit infrastructure that is inclusive of autonomous vehicles.