Call for papers for a special issue of
Transportation Research D: Transport and Environment
Problems with Discrete Choice Modelling and Implications for Environmental
Assessment
Guest editors: Stephane Hess & Riccardo Scarpa
Deadline for contributions: July 2008
Prospective authors are asked to notify the guest editors of their interest
in submitting a paper as soon as possible.
The process of transport modelling has long been critiqued by the
environmental community, primarily due to its bias towards road projects.
These issues are well known and much effort has been made in practice to
rectify these concerns, from including the choice of non-motorised modes, to
equilibrating models with feedback loops, and with a big focus on
integrating location choice or integrated land use models into the framework.
While these advances are welcome, they have typically assumed that the
mathematical and statistical properties of discrete choice models, that such
systems are generally based on, are robust. A problem in the area of choice
modelling is the sensitivity of model results to the quality of the data and
the model specification. As such, even just a handful of outliers in the
data can have a dramatic effect on model results. The use of mixing
distributions and other advanced modelling approaches has been a recent step
forward, but these often introduce additional problems. The results
produced by different model structures or with different specifications of
the utility function can differ significantly. Often, two models that are
mathematically quite similar (in terms of model fit) can in fact produce
very different results in terms of forecasts and willingness to pay
indicators. Even small differences in results can potentially have a
significant impact in cost benefit analyses and potential project selection.
Some of the issues mentioned above have been discussed repeatedly in the
existing literature. However, there is a lack of concrete evidence of the
effects of some of these issues and they have not been well documented. The
aim of this special issue is to:
• Highlight various issues with choice modelling, from a theoretical and
applied perspective
• Discuss possible effects of these issues in forecasting and policy making
• Present guidelines and potential remedies
• Highlight the issues associated with these problems for assessment of
transport projects and their environmental impacts
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