David Boyce and Huw Williams, Forecasting urban travel: Past, present and future

Urban Travel is an imposing book. Its 600+ pages are written in academic prose, interspersed with detailed quotations, high-quality graphics and a smattering of mathematics, deliberately placed in each chapter’s meticulous endnotes to increase readability. The chapters are ordered roughly chronologically, covering the entire gamut of computational transport forecasting models from the early developments in the US and UK (Chapters 2 and 3) through discrete choice modelling approaches (Chapters 4 and 5), activity-based and network equilibrium approaches (Chapters 6 and 7), the practice of travel forecasting (Chapters 8 and 9) to computational aspects of the field (Chapter 10) and prospects for the future (Chapter 11). The introductory and concluding chapters astutely synthesise these substantial strands of thought into a single narrative.