Model to Estimate Trip Distribution: Case Study of the Marmaray Project in Turkey

Abstract

Istanbul, the only city that straddles two continents, Europe and Asia, is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world with over thirteen million residents. The demand for transportation in Istanbul has been boosted considerably due to the increasing population and rising vehicle ownership. On the other hand, the transportation infrastructure has not been developing sufficiently to meet this demand. Hence, the Turkish government and local authorities sought various alternatives to the road transportation system in Istanbul and came up with the Marmaray Project, which was planned and designed to serve both intraurban and interurban passengers and freight transport. One of the main aims of the Marmaray Project is to shift the traffic demand from roads to the rail network. In this paper, a travel demand modeling framework was developed to calculate the transportation demand of the Marmaray corridor. In addition, a model including empirical modeling methods was developed for the highways to estimate the origin and destination matrices. The developed model was used to estimate freight and passenger transportation between Istanbul and other Turkish provinces. The estimated transportation demand results were used to calculate the required train numbers on a daily basis through the Marmaray corridor and some suggestions were put forward to increase the capacity of this corridor.