Travel Demand Model
BackMAPA maintains a Travel Demand Model (TDM) for the region as a tool for traffic forecasting to support long-range transportation planning and community development decisions.
A TDM is an important tool for transportation planning that estimates and distributes the area’s trips across its transportation network. The modeling process attempts to replicate existing traffic levels and transit ridership and forecast future traffic and transit demand based on anticipated population and employment growth.
One of the primary purposes of the TDM is to support the development of the local Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP). The model can be used to identify potential future deficiencies in the road network and used to estimate the impacts of various scenarios such as adding new roads, changing the capacity of existing roads, or removing roads from the network.
The most recent MAPA TDM was updated to a new base year of 2022 using the Iowa Standardized Model Structure 2.0 (ISMS 2.0). The Iowa Standardized Model Structure (ISMS) provides a standardized yet scalable travel demand modeling architecture for use by all MPO’s across Iowa, including MAPA. The standardization of ISMS promotes consistency between models as well as a number of additional benefits.