10 years of Moving Modelling On: what needs to change in the next decade?

Tom van Vuren, a divisional director at Mott MacDonald, has been chairman of Modelling World since its inception in 2006. In advance of this year’s event he offers his reflections and considers the way ahead

On Thursday 4 June, 2015, we will celebrate the 10th Modelling World  nee the Transport Modelling Forum. The other day I browsed through the 2006 Modelling World programme and it is disconcerting how many questions and concerns raised back then remain valid today. Neither the techniques we use today, nor the supporting software, have evolved more than piecemeal.  

Yet the past ten years have thrown us a few future uncertainties. The peak car debate is interesting. For me, the observation that car ownership and usage has so much reduced in young males shook our beliefs that behaviour that we observed in the present can be transferred into the future, a fundamental assumption in our traditional models.  It means two things: first we need to consider the segmentation in our models, and the minimum WebTAG segmentation, which ignores age and gender, will just not cut it. Then, it is inevitable that we need to explore alternative futures; for example one where the recently observed behavioural change is permanent and one where this phenomenon turns out to be just a temporary blip.

Such scenario testing is also going to be necessary for the advent of alternative modes such as autonomous vehicles or shared mobility services such as car clubs. And what about the possibilities of cycling? We are only starting to conceptualise what may happen to mode choice and network operations. I just cannot see how we can afford not to look at scenarios and use them to determine resilient transport decisions.

For several years Big Data has been on Modelling World's agenda, and data use and visualisation are also a strong focus for 2015. Everyone has high hopes for Big Data and I would be very disappointed if in the next 10 years we don’t manage to establish robust ways in which to build our models from passively collected data sources such as mobile phones.  But I expect more. These abundant new data should allow us to explore travel behaviour in much more depth than traditional surveys ever could, and hopefully find correlations that previously were invisible. Yes, I mean correlations! And I know that correlation is something quite distinct from causation, but sometimes correlations (without understanding) may suffice, for example in very short term predictions when we just cannot afford to understand before we act.  I am particularly excited about the possibility of unexpected correlations that may lead to new insights, hypotheses that can be properly tested for causality and ultimately lead to new model forms.

View the programme for 2015 on Modelling World's website