Mounting urban traffic congestion is currently one of the crippling problems facing Metro Manila and most major cities of the Asia-Pacific Region. Because of Manila's scarce and limited resources, transport agencies and policy-makers are under constant pressure to provide innovative programs to extract maximum efficiency from an already overstretched transportation system. This paper presents the initial results of research on understanding Manila's congestion problem by focusing on the generation of travel demand. The paper reports on an analysis of the trip-generation characteristics of the population of Metro Manila based on the Metro Manila Urban Transportation Integrated Studies database collected by the National Center for Transportation Studies. The analysis employs structural equation modelling (SEM) and proceeds to develop a demographic and activity based model of the spatial and temporal distribution of the travel demands of the 1996 population. This paper reports on the initial applications of SEM to develop measurement models for travel behaviour. Succeeding publications will report on the derivation of the full structural equation models and the validation of the results. (a).
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