An empirical test of the competing destinations model

Abstract.

 It has long been believed that properties of spatial structure have a strong effect on trip distribution, which thus leads to a bias in the estimated distance decay parameters of spatial interaction models. This paper is an attempt to identify to what extent the spatial structure effect affects the trip distribution and determine whether the incorporation of a term to account for the relative location of destinations into the conventional gravity models, results in a model that can more correctly represent the actual trip distribution. The main focus is on the comparison of the origin–specific estimates of the distance decay parameter, calibrated from the traditional production-constrained model and the production-constrained competing destinations model. The results show that the competing destinations model is superior to the conventional model in both reproducing the interaction flows and giving behavioral explanation to the distance decay parameters, but the essential aim of the competing destinations model to remove the map pattern from the distance decay parameters of the conventional model has not been identified.