Modeling the travel demand of vacationers and same day visitors in large cities II

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Carsten Sommer
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409499825

The overall objective of the follow-up project is the further development of the previously developed model framework for the representation of tourist travel demand in large cities with a focus on the mode choice model. The traffic volume in cities with a strong tourism sector consists to a considerable extent of tourist traffic. Therefore, the modelling of CO2 reduction measures is also of great relevance for this travel demand sector. The fact that CO2 reductions in the tourism sector are primarily to be expected through shifting of car trips to walking, cycling, and using public transport is considered in the project by focusing on the mode choice. This will improve the forecasting ability of municipal and regional travel demand models and thus enable a more precise impact assessment of measures. In detail, the following individual objectives are to be achieved: - Development and application of a survey method that records the trips of holiday travelers and in particular their activities with a high degree of accuracy, - Use of new data sources (e.g., google trends) to improve the input data, - Development of an approach to automatically detect spatial activities in travel data, - Development and application of a trip chain approach to model the mode choice, - Gaining a better understanding of the decision-making processes and relevant influencing factors for the travel behavior of holiday travelers and validating the model results using qualitative methods, - deriving further insights on touristic traffic in large cities and on the transferability of the methodology and findings to other cities. Qualitative interviews are planned to gain a better and deeper understanding of the decision-making processes that take place during holidays and specific influencing factors. In this way, insights into the heterogeneity of the decision-making processes as well as into their representability and transferability will be gained, which will allow a better classification of the model results and their transferability to similar, but also to different cities. For the survey of travel behavior, a combined approach of classical interviews and the collection of travel data with the help of a tracking app for smartphones is used, whereby the automatic tracking should help to overcome the specific difficulties of touristic travel surveys, such as the lacking local knowledge of travelers and the higher importance of spatial activities. The transferability of the different sub-models as well as the model framework to other cities will be investigated with the help of analyses of the activities and trips taken by tourists. Therefore, the survey with a tracking app will be applied to another city that is structurally comparable to Kassel.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants