Category:Ridership forecasting

Ridership forecasting makes it possible to compare outcomes of potential transit network modifications, including by comparing expected fare revenue, mode shift to transit, and capacity requirements. Ridership forecasting is required for many capital grant applications and for short-term planning efforts. Ridership forecast models take into account factors including population densities and demographics, trip attractors and generators (major destinations and jobs), and, when local change scenarios are being considered, connectivity within the existing transit network.

GTFS is increasingly used to describe transit network scenarios and load these into various forecasting software. The benefits of introducing GTFS in this workflow are:

• It is possible to leverage the growing selection of software for editing GTFS.
• In many cases, the existing transit network is described in GTFS, so new route(s) or a surgical a subset of routes can be considered in context of the larger network.

See Fundamentals of Transportation/Transit Demand on Wikibooks.