Signature Project 1B-Integrated Land-Use, Transportation and Environmental Modeling

摘要

Land use and transportation are inextricably linked. Models that capture the dynamics and interactions of both systems are indispensable for evaluating alternative courses of action in policy and investment. These models must be spatially disaggregated and complex enough to allow for the realistic evaluation of strategies that are of significance to policy and planning, but this comes at a cost; disaggregation and complexity require money, time and resources and often these sacrifices are not cost-effective. Unfortunately little guidance exists in the literature about these tradeoffs or the appropriate level of complexity and disaggregation needed for modeling under different applications. The linkages between land use and transportationand the need to account for those linkages in planninghave been well established by many researchers (Giuliano 1989; Moore, Thorsnes et al. 1996; Boarnet and Chalermpong 2001; Cervero 2003) as well as by the Federal Highway Administration (USDOT 1999). In fact, under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 and the Transportation Equity Act for the Twenty First Century (TEA-21) of 1997 (to a lesser extent), state or regional transportation agencies have been required to model the effect of transportation infrastructure development on land use patterns, and to consider the consistency of transportation plans and programs with provisions of land use plans in order to receive certain types of federal transportation funds. Other federal programs have attempted to encourage integrated land use and transportation modeling, including the Travel Model Improvement Program (1992) and the Transportation and Community and System Preservation Pilot program (1999). For these reasons, Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), which already almost universally use transportation models, are increasingly integrating dynamic land-use modeling into those efforts. In particular, these integrated models are frequently used to evaluate transportation infrastructure performance, investment alternatives, and air quality impacts under alternative scenarios.