Brian Large Bursary Fund

Susanna Bass, a Traffic Control Engineer with Transport for London, TfL,  was awarded the 2012 Voorhees-Large Prize for her dissertation 'Development and Evaluation of Synthetic Populations for London' submitted for her transport Masters at Imperial College London and UCL.

 

Susanna joined TfL’s Transport Planning and Modelling graduate scheme after graduating from Warwick University in 2009 with a 1st Class Mathematics BSc. Having completed the TfL scheme, Susanna was appointed to her current role, which involves using tactical assignment modelling to analyse the network impact of a range of traffic schemes. TFL sponsored her to study part-time for her Transport Masters, for which she was awarded Distinction. In her spare time, Susanna enjoys painting and drawing, finding the hidden gems amongst London's many restaurants, and travelling.

 

In her dissertation Susanna sought to explore the concept of synthetic demand and how it could be used to improve the quality of travel demand modelling for London. She used 1991 Census and London Area Transport Survey data as inputs to population synthesis software PopGen to create a set of synthetic populations for London, using different geographical levels and control variables. To understand the suitability of these synthetic populations, she used a number of analysis techniques, comparing the synthesised with the Office of National Statistics’ Samples of Anonymised Records.