City Science was appointment by Thurrock Council to develop a ground-breaking, multi-modal strategic transport model. The model will ultimately support the emerging Thurrock Local Plan in a way that maximises social and environmental benefits, including the need to support Thurrock Council’s decarbonisation ambitions.
Scope
Our scope was to develop a multi-modal strategic transport model for Thurrock Council, to assess the transport impacts of the Local Plan and assist identification and appraisal of future interventions. The model was to be compatible with other TAG-compliant models such as National Highway’s South East Regional Traffic Model, the Lower Thames Area Model and Transport East’s Agent Based Model.
City Science Response
Applying our extensive modelling knowledge and previous experience, we built a 2019 SATURN-based highway model and EMME-based public transport and variable demand model. A key challenge faced is the data deficit for building the 2019 model.
To overcome this, we maximised our innovative data science capability through extracting and consolidating various data sources together, such as Teletrac journey time data, data from transport operators and other transport models, as well as many opensource data such as Bus Open Data. We carried out a series of data scrutiny and analysis, which forms a solid foundation for the model to be robust and achieve the relevant TAG requirements.
Thurrock Strategic Transport Model Modelling Area
Next Steps
We are currently rebasing the 2019 model to 2023 and developing future year forecast models.