Nearly 50,000 Texans, sometimes called “super-commuters,” travel back and forth between Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth more than once a week. Many others make the trip very regularly.
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) was preparing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the proposed Dallas-Fort Worth Core Express Service (DFWCES) project. The project will connect Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston with a High Speed Rail (HSR) link.
A HSR service will provide Texans a safe, reliable and convenient alternative to driving or flying. Passengers will be able to travel between North Texas and Houston in about 90 minutes without fear of delay, which will help ease traffic and congestion along the I-45 corridor, the 2nd deadliest highway in the U.S. Ridership studies show the average traveler will save over 120 minutes when making this trip compared with driving or flying.
How we helped
Steer developed for TxDOT an inter-urban HSR ridership forecasting model for the Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston corridor. A private company, Texas Central Partners (TCP) has proposed a dedicated high speed rail system between Dallas and Houston. The approximately 240-mile high-speed rail line would offer a total travel time of less than 90 minutes, with departures every 30 minutes during peak periods each day, and every hour during off-peak periods.
The work effort required careful integration of the inter-urban modeling system led by TCP with the intra-urban HSR model for the Dallas-Fort Worth region being developed for TxDOT by WSP. The model allowed analysing the ridership and revenue impacts on the DFW region of various alternative TCP designs.
Rather than following the traditional practice of keeping urban and intercity models separate and trying to patch the two together in modeling post processing steps, we built a highly flexible method of exchanging mode choice logsums between the urban and intercity models, making each appropriately sensitive to those calculated using the other.
Successes and outcomes
The resulting models (intra-urban and inter-urban) and associated forecasting capabilities fulfilled the requirements of a Tier 2 analysis as defined by the Federal Railroad Administration.
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