Prior work

There is little literature on pedagogical practices surrounding travel demand modeling. Most transportation planning and engineering programs cover the topic (Zhou and Schweitzer 2009), but it was not even included on a semi-regular survey of transportation faculty regarding what they consider the most important topics in introductory courses (Turochy 2013).

There is, however, a long history of pedagogy around teaching through simulating real-world activities undertaken by practitioners, rather than through one-to-many classroom instruction. This is most well established in the medical field, with positive outcomes for student learning (McGaghie et al. 2010). Simulation activities are widely used in transportation engineering instruction (Hurwitz et al. 2015), and research on active learning techniques in transportation engineering goes back decades (Weir 2004). Simulation activities in planning have a similarly long history (e.g., Meier and Duke 1966).

Effective simulations as an educational tool often take the form of a game. Solving transportation challenges is one of the recurrent examples in the foundational book on gamification in education, Clark Abt’s Serious Games (Abt 1970). More recently, physical board games have been used to teach transportation planning using both popular-press games (Huang and Levinson 2012) and purpose-built educational games (Paget-Seekins 2021).

Computer-based simulations have rapidly become ubiquitous in transportation engineering education (Hurwitz et al. 2015). Liao, Liu, and Levinson (2009) built a web-based traffic simulation tool to help students experiment with signal timing practices. The interactive A/B Street traffic-simulation software has likewise been used in undergraduate courses at Arizona State University (Carlino, Li, and Kirk 2024). An economic simulation of airline operations has also been applied to help budding engineers understand airline operations (Luken et al. 2011).

Computer-based simulations have also been applied in planning, although perhaps less frequently. Simulations in planning classrooms often take the form of commercial planning games, such as SimCity or Cities: Skylines (Gaber 2007; Khan and Zhao 2021), likely due to less funding for purpose-built simulations in planning as opposed to engineering. A significant challenge with commercial games is that they are intended primarily for entertainment, and thus may oversimplify or even modify system dynamics to support enjoyable gameplay rather than educational outcomes (Gaber 2007; Walker 2009). The advantage is that commercial games are more likely to receive significant upfront investment as well as continued support, a significant problem with games developed for educational purposes (Söbke, Harder, and Planck-Wiedenbeck 2018).

Public education and communication are another arena of planning where gamification and simulation have been deployed. The Future Energy Chicago exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry engaged participants in a several-hour, facilitated game to improve energy outcomes. Survey data suggests that the game improved some aspects of willingness to conserve energy (Applebaum, Price, and Foster 2021). The CityScope platform provides a hands-on physical environment wherein members of the public can make land-use changes to a Lego model of a neighborhood and see computer simulation output regarding transport and energy consumption in real time (Alonso et al. 2018). The CoAXs platform allows meeting participants to see how proposed Bus Rapid Transit routes would affect their ability and the ability of other citizens to reach key destinations, and was found to support improved learning and discussion outcomes among participants (Stewart and Zegras 2016; Stewart 2017). All of these simulations are perforce somewhat simpler than might be used in a classroom environment, since they target the general public rather than future practitioners.

Teaching travel demand modeling differs from other places where simulations have been deployed in transportation education. Travel demand models are themselves simulations of complex urban systems. Applying them in a classroom environment does not demand developing a new simulation. Rather, it means simplifying the existing structure of demand models to create one suitable for students with only a rudimentary understanding of the theory and mathematics involved.

The only travel demand modeling software designed specifically for education I am aware of is the now-defunct Agent-Based Demand and Assignment Model (ADAM) software (Zhu, Xie, and Levinson 2011). ADAM implemented a simple agent-based model for transportation education. This model focused on a network assignment for simple networks; it started with production (workers) and attractions (jobs), and students modified the network to reduce congestion. Likely due to computational limits in place at the time, it worked with a very simple network of only 24 nodes and 68 links.

I focus on the ubiquitous four-step model in my introductory courses. The four-step model was one of the earliest travel demand models developed (Weiner 2013; Federal Highway Administration 1977). While it has come under significant criticism lately (Mladenovic and Trifunovic 2014), it remains in common use. Many large regions have transitioned to more modern activity-based models, but many smaller regions and even some large ones continue to use the four-step model.

This work © 2026 by Matt Bhagat-Conway is licensed under CC BY 4.0

References

Abt, Clark C. 1970. Serious Games. New York, Viking Press. http://archive.org/details/seriousgames0000abtc.

Alonso, Luis, Yan Ryan Zhang, Arnaud Grignard, Ariel Noyman, Yasushi Sakai, Markus ElKatsha, Ronan Doorley, and Kent Larson. 2018. “CityScope: A Data-Driven Interactive Simulation Tool for Urban Design. Use Case Volpe.” In Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX, edited by Alfredo J. Morales, Carlos Gershenson, Dan Braha, Ali A. Minai, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, 253–61. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_27.

Applebaum, Lauren R., C. Aaron Price, and Anjylla Y. Foster. 2021. “Collaboration and Competition in Exhibit Facilitation Around Energy Literacy.” Journal of Museum Education 46 (1): 113–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2020.1858268.

Carlino, Dustin, Yuwen Li, and Michael Kirk. 2024. “A/B Street.” 2024. https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/index.html.

Federal Highway Administration. 1977. “PLANPAC/BACKPAC General Information Manual : Computer Programs for Urban Transportation Planning.” https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ien.35556021025184.

Gaber, John. 2007. “Simulating Planning: SimCity as a Pedagogical Tool.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (2): 113–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X07305791.

Huang, Arthur, and David Levinson. 2012. “To Game or Not to Game: Teaching Transportation Planning with Board Games.” Transportation Research Record 2307 (1): 141–49. https://doi.org/10.3141/2307-15.

Hurwitz, David S., Kristen L. Sanford Bernhardt, Rod E. Turochy, and Rhonda K. Young. 2015. “Transportation Engineering Instructional Practices: Analytic Review of the Literature.” Transportation Research Record 2480 (1): 45–54. https://doi.org/10.3141/2480-06.

Khan, Tayyeb Ahmed, and Xin Zhao. 2021. “Perceptions of Students for a Gamification Approach: Cities Skylines as a Pedagogical Tool in Urban Planning Education.” In Responsible AI and Analytics for an Ethical and Inclusive Digitized Society, edited by Denis Dennehy, Anastasia Griva, Nancy Pouloudi, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Ilias Pappas, and Matti Mäntymäki, 763–73. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85447-8_64.

Liao, Chen-Fu, Henry X. Liu, and David M. Levinson. 2009. “Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering Education and Training: Engaging Undergraduate Students in Transportation Studies.” Transportation Research Record 2109 (1): 12–21. https://doi.org/10.3141/2109-02.

Luken, Brittany, Susan Hotle, Meltem Alemdar, and Laurie Garrow. 2011. “A Case Study: Educating Transportation Engineers with Simulation Software.” In 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, 22.19.1–10. Vancouver, BC: ASEE Conferences. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--17301.

McGaghie, William C, S Barry Issenberg, Emil R Petrusa, and Ross J Scalese. 2010. “A Critical Review of Simulation-Based Medical Education Research: 2003–2009.” Medical Education 44 (1): 50–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03547.x.

Meier, Richard L., and Ricbard D. Duke. 1966. “Gaming Simulation for Urban Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 32 (1): 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366608978484.

Mladenovic, Milos, and Aleksandar Trifunovic. 2014. “The Shortcomings of the Conventional Four Step Travel Demand Forecasting Process.” Journal of Road and Traffic Engineering, January.

Paget-Seekins, Laurel. 2021. “Transform Transit.” Laurel in Transit. October 20, 2021. https://laurelintransit.com/transform-transit/.

Söbke, Heinrich, Raimo Harder, and Uwe Planck-Wiedenbeck. 2018. “Two Decades of Traffic System Education Using the Simulation Game MOBILITY.” In Serious Games, edited by Stefan Göbel, Augusto Garcia-Agundez, Thomas Tregel, Minhua Ma, Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, Manuel Oliveira, Tim Marsh, and Polona Caserman, 43–53. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02762-9_6.

Stewart, Anson F. 2017. “Mapping Transit Accessibility: Possibilities for Public Participation.” Transportation Research Part A 104 (January): 150–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2017.03.015.

Stewart, Anson F, and P Christopher Zegras. 2016. “CoAXs: A Collaborative Accessibility-based Stakeholder Engagement System for Communicating Transport Impacts.” Research in Transportation Economics, September, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2016.07.016.

Turochy, Rod E. 2013. “Structuring the Content of the First Course in Transportation Engineering: Perspectives of Engineers and Educators.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education & Practice 139 (3): 206–10. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000149.

Walker. 2009. “Did Sim City Make Us Stupid?” Human Transit. June 8, 2009. https://humantransit.org/2009/06/did-sim-city-make-us-stupid.html.

Weiner, Edward. 2013. Urban Transportation Planning in the United States: History, Policy, and Practice. New York, NY: Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5407-6.

Weir, Jennifer Anne. 2004. “Active Learning in Transportation Engineering Education.” PhD thesis, United States – Massachusetts: Worcester Polytechnic Institute. https://www.proquest.com/docview/305366413/abstract/FD41D00F66B9407EPQ/1.

Zhou, Jiangping, and Lisa Schweitzer. 2009. “Transportation Planning Education in the United States: Literature Review, Course Survey, and Findings.” Transportation Research Record 2109 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3141/2109-01.

Zhu, Shanjiang, Feng Xie, and David Levinson. 2011. “Enhancing Transportation Education Through Online Simulation Using an Agent-Based Demand and Assignment Model.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education & Practice 137 (1): 38–45. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)EI.1943-5541.0000038.