TRAVEL DEMAND. IN: ANALYTICAL TRANSPORT ECONOMICS. AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper describes how transport planning is basically concerned with the establishment of a stable relationship between the demand for, and the supply of traffic infrastructure and transport services. In recent years and in the current environment, the relationship between supply and demand has been somewhat one-sided in many European countries in the sense that (commodity and person) transport growth and demand for transport services have outstripped both investment outlay and institutional ability to deal with the complexity of the problem attached to the renewal and expansion of transport infrastructure. This strong contrast between traffic growth and infrastructure investments since the 1970s has resulted in transport bottlenecks in many countries and regions. This paper focuses on passenger transport and travel demand. The legacy of more than three decades of travel demand analysis is a larger, rather diverse and often disparate body of information. No longer is research into travel demand to be focused narrowly on the theme of forecasting. The need for the understanding of travel behavior has become a prominent theme. The paper describes how this broader debate has resulted in an influx of new ideas, methodologies, and techniques, which were stimulating to traffic researchers, but have frustrated transport practitioners seeking to identify state-of-the-art in the field.