University of California Transportation Center

Travel demand analysis and forecasting have developed rapidly over the past decade and are now entering a new "dynamic era" characterized by the recognition that time is an indispensable dimension of travel demand models (for overviews on the subject see Kitamura, 1990, and Pas, 1990). This paper addresses the development of new forecasting methods that explicitly account for this dynamic character of travel demand. The new approach, Microanalytic Integrated Demographic Accounting System (MIDAS), attempts to combine dynamic models of travel behavior with sociodemographic and economic microanalytic simulation. The strengths of this model system are: 1) the internal, to the model system, production of sociodemographic and economic forecasts, and 2) the flexibility of the new forecasting tool. In this paper the method is briefly described and major emphasis is given to experiments on the impact of sociodemographic changes on travel demand.