pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Dr. Stephen Boyles from the University of Texas at Austin gave a talk to transportation students and faculty at a PacTrans-sponsored transportation seminar on May 16 about uncertainty in travel demand forecasts. Around 30 people were in attendance. Typically, forecasts in travel demand appear in hindsight to have been too optimistic, which has often been attributed to planners personal biases in favor of certain projects. Dr. Boyles presented a hypothesis that the consistent optimism may actually be due to random errors in project evaluations combined with a deterministic project selection process. He has demonstrated that this could be the case by both theoretical deduction and computer simulations. Hopefully this could lead to new forecasting methodology that isn’t systematically biased. Also discussed was the need for distributions of predictions as opposed to an over reliance on point estimates. We would like to thank Dr. Boyles for coming and giving this highly informative talk about what is going on at the cutting edge of transportation research.