Latent demand for walking and cycling

Estimating latent, or suppressed, demand for walking and cycling is an emerging science in New Zealand, with limited research into the application and effectiveness of the different methods employed around the country over the past decade. This first stage of this research employed a literature review, and a survey and interviews of practitioners, to understand how latent demand for both walking and cycling is currently estimated in a range of New Zealand and overseas settings. It then assessed how well these methods incorporate data and research about existing travel behaviours and travel behaviour change, and their accuracy as determined by post-implementation count data (where possible). The second stage of this research employed the findings from stage one to create a decision tree, or framework, indicating approaches that could be adopted nationally in New Zealand for greater consistency in walking and cycling demand estimation. It also identified the need for, and initiated the development of, a walking and cycling demand case study database to aid the practice of forecasting walking and cycling demand in New Zealand. This research found that the past decade has seen substantial progress made to develop the range and quality of methods used to forecast latent demand for walking and cycling. It has also seen efforts being made to better incorporate insights from research into walking and cycling behaviour and behaviour change. As expected, it was also found that methods to forecast demand for cycling were far more abundant and tended to be more advanced than those for walking. Additionally, the information available about the various methods, their application, and their evaluation is highly variable and inconsistent. The full report is available from the New Zealand Transport Agency web site at https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/research/reports/676/676-latent-demand-for-walking-and-cycling.pdf