Spatial Behavior in Transportation Modeling and Planning

The demand for transportation services is a derived demand based on the needs of people to perform daily and other episodic activities. There have been two dominant approaches to investigating this derived demand: (a) studies focused on the spatial behavior of people, that is, the recorded behavior of people as they move between origins and destinations (e.g., Hanson & Schwab, 1995), and (b) an examination of the decision-making and choice processes that result in spatially manifest behaviors (e.g. Ben-Akiva & Lerman, 1985: Ortuzar & Willumsen, 1994). The former approach has been typified by the development of methods for describing and analyzing activity/travel patterns. The latter is typified both by the development of methods for describing and modeling the final outcomes of decision processes but paying little attention to the cognitive processes involved in determining the final decision concerning movement in space, and behavioral process models paying particular attention to the cognitive factors involved in decision-making as well as to the final choice act (Golledge & Stimson, 1997).