Demand Forecast and Elasticities Estimation of Public Transport

This paper is related to the choice of alternative types of public transport modes and its incidence in the Madrid Metropolitan Area. When planning transport facilities, two conditions are needed: efficient estimation of the users' response to changes in prices and in the characteristics of the services; and reliable predictions of demand. These two conditions are the main objectives of this paper. Given a monthly database, the authors address the first objective using a causal econometric model. As a baseline for forecasting comparisons, they also use new variants of univariate unobserved components models. Forecasting evaluation is based on a variety of accuracy measures to avoid misleading conclusions. © 2006 LSE and the University of Bath