The sensitivity of the urban transportation planning process (utpp) to differences (or errors) in socioeconomic input is examined using the dallas-fort worth area as a case study. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the final output of the utpp, link volumes, is sensitive to errors in the district-level forecasting of population and employment. Planners undertaking corridor-level studies should bemost concerned about the reliability and accuracy of district-levelsocioeconomic forecasts, particularly for districts directly servedby the corridor. Because local transportation facilities are most sensitive to errors in zone level inputs, site-specific studies may be severely affected by data errors at the traffic zone level. Greater attention should be paid to suburban areas where the potential forintroducing large input errors is high. Because of the potential for large assignment errors, expansion of a district-to-district trip table to a zone-to-zone trip table should be avoided. Travel demand models must be applied using traffic zone-level data, not district-level data. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1328, Travel demand forecasting: new methodologies and travel behavior research 1991
Abstract