Chapter 2: History of Demand Modelling

The fundamentals of transport modelling were developed in the USA during the 1950s, in the context of the pioneering Detroit and Chicago Transportation Studies. These techniques were imported into the UK in the early 1960s, initially for the London conurbation, and the following 20 years saw important theoretical developments on both sides of the Atlantic. As we discuss in this chapter, despite the growth of some alternative “paradigms,” the development of the mainstream techniques has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There have, nonetheless, been important changes. On the one hand, largely as a result of work done in the 1970s, a unifying framework, compatible with economic theory, has been developed, providing a justification and clarification of methods which were originally proposed on essentially practical grounds, and on the other hand, the major increase in computing power over the last decade or so has greatly expanded the scale and detail of the problems that can be analysed by modelling techniques.