Project Meeting 2020.02.21

Project Management (milestone)

• 5B amendment looks good; @Bill process amendment and NTP soon
• @Ben process PopulationSim release; This is now done.
• Both ActivitySim and PopulationSim are Python 3
• @PMC revisit future features to plan for upcoming work
  • see @Alex's email
  • @Joe setup separate March discussion
• @Bill working on MOU updates with MetCouncil
• Will get feedback from @PMC on AMPO website pages for ActivitySim

Task 5 TNCs (milestone)

• Discussed Ohio DOT insights related to CT-RAMP 2 design:
  • Includes Taxi mode with utility = ivt_time + constant_fare + cost_per_mile * distance
  • No wait time
  • TNC mode applies modifiers to taxi mode
  • Auto ownership uses an accessibility measure by TNC mode as well. The accessibility by TNC coefficient was asserted.
  • @Ben add notes above to Adding TNCs. This is now done.
• Discussed lognormal distributed wait times and the need for data driven model design
  • In addition to wait time variability, there is variability in cost and variability by time-of-day
  • We only want defensible, data driven, empirically observed model designs
  • Can we setup the model software structure without observed data or should we wait until after we get the data?
  • We have two goals for activitysim:
    • A great platform / technology
    • A recommended example / good starting point for a model design
  • So, it was decided to:
    • Use just mean wait times for now
    • Not add TNC to transit since the mode share is super tiny, it means changes in logsums and calibration updates, and it isn't worth the additional effort, expression complexity, and runtime.
    • @SFCTA to look into new TNC data for better insights related to wait times and costs
    • @MTC to review Portland data used for estimating TM1.5 wait time distributions
  • The exercise of adding TNC illustrates that is straightforward to add TNC to transit if desired

Task 6 Model Developer Tutorial (milestone)

• Discuss command line interface to distribute setup and example to improve the tutorial/user experience
• Looks good to everyone so we'll finalize the design and then create a pull request for review
• We'll update just activitysim for now