THE "INTERVENING OPPORTUNITIES" METHOD OF TRAFFIC ANALYSIS

The mathematical analysis of traffic is rapidly becoming a highly specialized activity. During the last two decades, traffic planning has become a fruitful field for analysis and has progressed rapidly from dependence on simple origin destination surveys to complex, all embracing mathematical model building. The article reviews briefly some of the early forerunners of the more refined techniques which began emerging during the 1950s. The focus of the article is what has become known as the method of "intervening opportunities". The fundamental meaning of this hypothesis, in short is that the distance does not have its expected effects, and the slopes of the opportunity curves provide the controlling influence.