[thanatropism]

Are you aware of the classic four-stage traffic assignment model? It's the linear regression of transportation modeling. It's scary that the authors didn't even mention that it exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_forecasting#Fou...

My first job was to estimate trip generation models (the first tier) using simultaneous-equations time-series models in Eviews; a transportation engineer with some experience doing surveys (i.e. coordinating teams of people with clipboards) worked on the mode choice. We had additionally some greyheads who had the Matlab codes for trip distribution and route assignment.

Realistically some machine learning type classification could really help in mode choice, particularly if raw data (like turnstile pushes) is available. Trip generation, like most microeconometrics with time-series, is something of a dark art.

Ideally we would all be doing agent-based simulation by now with super-disaggregate data like Waze has, but I haven't seen complex systems simulation really "arrive" for real problems. It'd be fun to train reinforcement learners on them too :)