Copenhagen sees a lot of traffic, and congestion charging policies are currently high on the political agenda in the city. In 2006, RAND Europe developed Copenhagen's Ørestad Traffic Model (OTM), which helped city planners better design policies to reduce congestion, but adding additional functionality will help even more.
RAND Europe, working in collaboration with TetraPlan and Significance, were commissioned by the Danish Road Directorate to extend the existing OTM for the Greater Copenhagen region so that it is able to predict time of day choice for car drivers and thus assess the effectiveness of different charging policies aimed at reducing congestion levels at particular times of day.
RAND Europe's role in the project was to extend the scope of existing models of mode-destination choice so that they are also able to predict time of day choice. The models need to be extended to represent the different time period alternatives available to individuals. Additionally, researchers need to determine the senstivity of time of day choice relative to the mode and destination choice decisions.
The objective was to determine these sensitivities drawing first on the household interview data collected in Copenhagen used for the mode-destination model estimation. If the sensitivities could not be estimated from the household interview data, relative sensitivities would be imported from stated-preference evidence collected in different studies.
The results suggest that it is possible to estimate the time period choice sensitivities from the household interview data. In most other similar studies, it has not been possible to estimate time of day choice sensitivities in this way.
