Transportation planning has been concentrated on demand management as detailed in recent legislation such as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). With the advent of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) and different management measures such as carpooling, vanpooling and telecommuting, transportation modeling needs to incorporate analyses on these policy measures. Recent computer technology offers versatile functionality to model and evaluate impacts of these policies Geographic information systems (GIS), as an integrating technology, has been increasingly used by DOT to handle transportation modeling and planning needs.

This paper introduces the theme of the special issue and lays a foundation for arguments concerning the potential usefulness of Object-Oriented Geographic Information Systems (OOGIS) for the development and testing of disaggregate behavioral travel models. It also states goals for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research and discusses the role of behavioral travel models in pursuing ITS goals and objectives.

It is only in the last few decades that geographers have become aware of their special skills and knowledge systems for understanding space in domains other than objective physical reality. As this awareness has grown, however, it has become more and more obvious that spatial knowledge is much more than the sensing or description of landmarks, routes and areas in an internal representation of environment.

The emergence of geographical theory was an inevitable product of the desire to systematize existing geographic knowledge and to use that systematized base to explore new areas of knowledge. Although the usefulness of theory and predictive models in geography is by now a matter of record, it was not always the case. The usefulness and need for theories was often disputed, despite the oft-repeated argument that theories of location explained the laws of spatial distributions, theories of interaction explain the laws of movement and spatial behaviour, theories of growth and development explain the nature of past, present, and future states of being, and theories of decision-making and choice explain observable regularities and repeatable trends in individual, group, institutional and governmental behaviours. Hudson (1969) argued that a theory represents a direct attempt to provide a logical system or nesting place for previously noted regularities – in his case concerning changes in rural settlement patterns. While Hudson’s task was specific, the sentiment he expressed has widespread relevance for the emergence and adoption of geographical theories generally.

The purpose of this paper is to examine from a cognitive behavioral point of view the processes of path selection. This activity is designed to interface with another project concerned with building a GIS based Computational Process Model designed to identify feasible opportunity sets for destination choice and path selection. The project is multi-year in nature, depending in part on the successful completion of laboratory and survey research which is designed to define the criteria used in path selection and to show how sets of prioritized temporal activities can define spatial sets of feasible alternative destinations.

Two critical characteristics of human wayfinding are destination choice and path selection. Traditionally, the path selection problem has been ignored or assumed to be the result of minimizing procedures such as selecting the shortest path, the quickest path or the least costly path. In this paper I draw on existing literature from cognitive mapping and cognitive distance, to define possible route selection criteria other than these traditional ones. Experiments with route selection on maps and in the field are then described and analyzed to determine which criteria appear to be used as the environment changes and as one increases the number of nodes along a path (i.e., as trip chaining replaces a simple Origin-Destination (O-D) pairing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether people in general understand elementary spatial concepts, and to examine whether or not naive spatial knowledge includes the ability to understand important spatial primitives that are built into geographic theory, spatial databases and geographic information systems (GIS). The extent of such understanding is a partial measure of spatial ability. Accurate indicators or measures of spatial ability can be used to explain different types of spatial behavior. In this paper I first examine the relation between spatial ability and spatial behavior, then present experimental evidence of the ability of people to understand spatial concepts such as nearest neighbors (proximity), and spatial distributions. A final commentary is made about the possible difference between "common sense" and "expert" spatial knowledge, and the implications of such results for the comprehension of space at all scales.

In this paper I examine processes involved in place recognition and wayfinding in the context of spatial knowledge acquisition generally. Recognizing places is seen to be of vital importance in developing a declarative base: wayfinding is viewed as the most common means of acquiring place knowledge. Characteristics of place recognition are examined along with discussion of errors in place cognition and the role that spatial familiarity plays in attaching importance weights to distinguish primary nodes (anchor points) from other places. Wayfinding is characterized as route knowledge acquired via procedural rules. Parameters of wayfinding are discussed in reference to navigation in familiar and unfamiliar environments. The expression of wayfinding in terms of computational process models is examined, and the future role of geographic information systems in such modelling is explored in the penultimate section.