From OD data to agent-based-modelling for car-free futures

9 March 2022, Transport Data Science seminar

Dustin Carlino

Intro

About me

  • https://twitter.com/CarlinoDustin
  • A/B Street since 2018
  • Alan Turing Institute since December 2021
  • Not an expert on demand modeling; I just need it as input
    • Traffic simulation community
    • Transport data science community
    • Videogame industry?! Watch Dogs: Legion

Talk outline

  1. A/B Street quick overview
  2. Travel demand models overview
  3. From UK OD data to a demand model
  4. Activity models
  5. Mode shift
  6. Exercises / discussion

Part 1: A/B Street overview

Squeeze detail out of OpenStreetMap

Edit the infrastructure

Simulator

Simulate traffic

Plan bike networks

bike.abstreet.org

Low-traffic neighborhoods

ltn.abstreet.org

15-minute neighborhoods

15m.abstreet.org

Arcade game, “edutainment”

santa.abstreet.org

Architecture

Architecture

Components

Part 2: Demand model overview

What

{
  "scenario_name": "minimal",
  "people": [
    {
      "trips": [
        {
          "departure": 10000,
          "origin": {
            "longitude": -122.303723,
            "latitude": 47.6372834
          },
          "destination": {
            "longitude": -122.31905,
            "latitude": 47.63786
          },
          "mode": "Bike",
          "purpose": "Meal"
        },
        {
          "departure": 12000000,
          "origin": {
            "longitude": -122.31905,
            "latitude": 47.63786
          },
          "destination": {
            "longitude": -122.3075948,
            "latitude": 47.6394773
          },
          "mode": "Walk",
          "purpose": "Recreation"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/tech/dev/formats/scenarios.html

What

  • More attributes about people
    • vehicle ownership
    • routing preference
    • willing to pay toll road
    • comfortable biking up-hills, at night, alongside fast traffic

What

  • One “typical” weekday?
    • Different scenario for weekends, special events
    • People have different travel behavior daily
    • Dangers of disaggregation

Use cases

  • traffic simulation
  • low-traffic neighborhoods: where do people drive, to predict detours
  • PCT & Ungap the Map: look for short driving trips that might cycle instead
  • RAMP: daily behavior in shared spaces for COVID transmission
    • broken down by activity – entertainment, work, home, retail
    • lockdown behavior, risk at venues

Some open source travel demand models

Part 3: Let’s build one for the UK!

Input data

  • wu03ew_v2: 2011, Location of usual residence and Place of work by Method of travel to work
    • Old, pre-pandemic
    • Only home -> work

Input data: MSOA zones

Desire line

Overall idea

Home

Work

Overall idea

  • For each (origin, destination, mode) desire line
    • Repeat for the number of trips here
      • Sample an origin and destination from the MSOA
      • Create a person who goes home -> work in AM, work -> home in PM

Desire lines

{
  from_zone: zone123,
  to_zone: zone456,
  mode: walk, bike, drive...,
  number_trips: 500
}
  • Re-shape the input into this format
    • One mode per entry
    • Filter + simplify the modes
  • Why have an intermediate common format?

Jittering: sampling an origin or destination

  • Just inside the study area
  • odjitter
  • Random points?
    • Origins: buildings where people live
    • Destinations: buildings where people work

Buildings from OpenStreetMap tags

Buildings from OpenStreetMap tags

  • Make sure your library gives you the right data, building=shop
  • Just look at the data in OSM

Weighted choices (for origins)

Trip attractor tables (for destinations)

What data could help us pick better?

  • Desire line breakdown by Standard Industry Codes?
  • NOMIS UKBC

Aside: missing buildings in OSM

Study area size

  • We can’t just keep expanding our study area forever
  • Some trips will begin or end off-map
  • Use % overlap to scale number of trips

Jittering when out-of-bounds

  • We don’t know off-map buildings
  • Snap to a border
    • Nearest Euclidean distance?
    • Weight by road type?

Jittering when out-of-bounds

  • Quickly pruning desire lines
  • Or just do pathfinding on a larger map?

Popping the stack

Popping the stack

Home

Work

Popping the stack

  • Issues we covered
    • OSM building tagging
    • Missing OSM buildings
    • Partly out-of-bounds zones
    • Off-map origins/destinations

Enjoying the results

  • Let’s simulate the results!

Dangers of using a microsimulation

  • Routing
  • Traffic signal timing
  • Parking
  • Conflicting movements near complex junctions

Re-aggregating

Part 4: Activity models

  • Limitations of the previous approach:
    • You need data
    • Only home to work
  • What are activity models?

The pipeline

  • Input
    • Number of people living in a zone
    • OpenStreetMap
  • Per-person
    • Assign a building as a home
    • Assign an “archetype” – student, worker, care-taker
    • Assign a schedule
    • Pick buildings matching each activity
    • Assign mode

Archetypes

  • Student, worker, care-taker
    • Other ideas?
  • What data would help us assign these?
    • Age, employment

Archetype to schedule

  • A student…
    • leaves home between 8-11
    • 95% of the time, spends 30 minutes on breakfast
    • goes to school for 3-6 hours
    • 30% of the time, spends 20-30 minutes on lunch
    • 60% of the time, spends 2 hours on “entertainment” – otherwise, 0.5-1.5 hours on errands
    • returns home

Data-driven schedules?

  • time use surveys

Where do activities occur?

Gravity model + mode choice

  • Attraction based on venue type
    • Advanced: based on income, prefer fancy vs cheap restaurant
  • Repulsion based on cost of getting there
  • Mode choice weighted by costs
    • but if know vehicle ownership, age of people…

Activity models for real

Even Soundcast isn’t meant for this level of disaggregation

Part 5: Mode shift

  • The most important question: how do planners convince people to change travel behavior?
    • Public transit: frequency, reliability, safety, price, coverage?
    • Cycling: safety, secure parking, showering at work, subsidizing e-bikes, culture?

An application of travel demand models

  • A small piece of the puzzle: PCT and Ungap the Map
    • Where should cycling interventions be prioritized?
  • Pipeline
    • Find (origin, destination) of driving trips
    • Filter by max time spent cycling and uphill distance
    • Convert to a route network, look for popular segments without cycle infrastructure

Questions

  • How do we calculate the cycling routes? (fastest vs quietest)
  • How much of a route has to be safe for someone to consider mode shift?

Part 6: Exercises / discussion

  • Install A/B Street
  • Import a new place
  • Procedurally generate buildings
  • Run a traffic simulation, observe problems
  • Try out LTN, 15-minute, other tools
  • Let’s edit OSM!

Discussions

  • Region-specific data sources for improving what we talked about today
  • How to calibrate a travel demand model?
    • What data tells us when we’re realistic?
    • What parameters change?
  • Do we need to start from scratch to make a model for new regions?

Notes

./cli generate-houses \
  --map data/system/us/seattle/maps/montlake.bin \
  --num-required 1 \
  --output houses.json