John H McDonald

I’m John McDonald, a travel demand modeler at GFT from Tampa Bay. I studied mathematics and statistics at UF. Two ideas drew me towards transportation. The first is the data itself: public infrastructure generates the volume of well-structured datasets necessary for machine learning applications. The second is the stakes: nearly every major project requires a demand forecast, and whatever gets built stays for decades. Get it wrong and even a one-minute inefficiency can cost a region centuries of people’s time every year. I developed a machine learning approach to trip generation variable selection and calibration that’s being adopted into an active regional model and I am currently working on a statewide hurricane evacuation model.

University of FloridaB.S. Mathematics · B.S. Statistics · August 2025