Calgary Commercial Vehicle Survey and Model
The City of Calgary, together with the Province of Alberta and the City of Edmonton, wanted to improve the representation of commercial vehicles in their models. HBA Specto was commissioned to work with the agencies to design the survey, manage the survey data collection firm, design and estimate models from the data, write software to implement the model, integrate the commercial vehicle model into the existing travel demand models, and calibrate and test the resulting integrated model.
We chose an establishment based survey because we were unhappy with truck based surveys, which do not capture light vehicle movements and service vehicles. A comprehensive survey was conducted of 64,000 commercial vehicle trips. Individual establishments were contacted at the management level and asked to participate. Smaller firms were asked to self-report all commercial movements for a day, larger firms were offered in-person assistance to track shipments, vehicle arrivals and vehicle departures.
A tour-based microsimulation model was developed, with tour departure, vehicle type, stop purpose, stop duration and stop location sub-models. These were calibrated to observed counts.
