Transport for London and Jacobs have developed a novel transport demand modelling tool to provide a more sophisticated response to the challenge of planning rail investment as the mobility sector enters an era of profound short- and long-term change. MoTiON should provide a step change in TfL’s ability to solve complex forecasting questions.
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed travel across the world and London is no exception, but in normal times a large proportion of all journeys are made by public transport. Overcrowding on some parts of the rail and Underground networks has a big impact on people’s quality of life, restricting access to jobs, education and training. The population of the Greater London Area is forecast to reach 10∙5 million by 2041, which would result in an additional 6 million daily trips. Planning for better interconnected rail, bus, cycling and walking facilities will be essential to meeting this growth in demand.
However, ongoing change in consumer behaviours, lifestyles and travel habits means that TfL’s planning tools need to be supplemented with an eye to the future. Among the drivers of change are the rapid increase in the usage of taxis and minicabs stimulated by app-based services, declining private car ownership levels among younger adults, and fast growth in cycling, despite an overall reduction in the number of trips per person, partly due to the increasing role of online shopping and business activity.
To understand the key drivers of changing trends, TfL first undertook research into the main factors influencing travel demand, explaining how journey patterns had changed over the last decade. It then commissioned the development of a new analytical framework including the Model of Travel in London (MoTiON) to enhance forecasting, and Project Edmond (Estimating Demand from Mobile Network Data) to provide a comprehensive view of travel patterns in London.
Project Edmond is thought to be the first such large-scale big data project undertaken in a global megacity. Sub-consultant Telefónica UK provided anonymised and aggregated mobile phone network data to deliver summaries of geographic travel patterns at a zonal (but not individual) level. This was then combined with a diverse range of complementary datasets such as those generated by Oyster smartcard use and the London Travel Demand Survey.