An explicit first-order contiguity constraint, adjacent matrix presentation, is proposed as a general integer programming model approach to the traffic analysis zone delineation problem. Model size and solution times are compared between the proposed contiguity constraint and another three. An agglomerative hierarchical clustering based heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model. For a large-sized case, the results of the proposed model and the other three ones are compared and analyzed. The results show that the proposed model is more suitable for solving a larger problem with approximate solutions in fairly reasonable time.