Sketch Planning Techniques to Assess Regional Air Quality Impacts of Congestion Mitigation Strategies
Record Type: DOT
Mobile sources present air quality issues in a variety of congested regions around the state, where travel delays are rising and transportation systems are in need of improvement. Within this context, it is important to anticipate, quantify, and communicate the benefits and costs of new, congestion-abating transportation projects and policies. While additions to existing systems may facilitate new and longer trips, thereby increasing regional vehicle-miles traveled (VMT), such VMT tends to occur at preferred times of day, to more attractive destinations and/or at lower costs. The travel time and cost savings, as well as added choice benefits for personal and commercial travelers, can be sizable, along with crash reductions and other benefits. Procedures are needed to permit early and comprehensive evaluation of project proposals, facilitate project prioritization, and enhance communication with all stakeholders, as transportation planners pursue and promote new and beneficial transportation improvement plans. The proposed project will develop such a procedure by synthesizing, expanding, upgrading, and refining existing and emerging tools within a user-friendly, highly accessible Microsoft Access software platform. The resulting toolkit will accommodate both basic and more detailed inputs, pivoting off of existing datasets while facilitating, where present, the travel demand modeling capabilities that already exist in Texas’ most congested nonattainment regions. Toolkit outputs will display all impacts of interest to the Project Monitoring Committee in both tabular and graphical formats (across the region of study), while highlighting any emission reductions from existing travelers and distinguishing these from emissions increases that emerge from latent demand. Within the existing vacuum of defensible sketch-level emissions impact procedures for large scale projects, the current project will produce a methodologically sound product, for others to emulate. All forecasting tools and recommendations will be clearly defined in a User Guidebook, for distribution at optional case study workshops and for immediate use by Texas metropolitan planning organization (MPO) and Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) modeling staff. All research findings and resulting recommendations will be presented in the form of Research and Project Summary Reports, and meetings with the Project Monitoring committee will occur at multiple points during the project period.
Start date: 2008/9/1
End date: 2010/8/31
Status: Active
Contract/Grant Number: 0-6235
Total Dollars: 0
Source Organization: Texas Department of Transportation
Date Added: 10/09/2008
Index Terms: Traffic congestion, Congestion mitigation, Air quality management, Traffic delay, Vehicle miles of travel, Transportation projects, Transportation planning, Metropolitan planning organizations, Texas, Research projects, Sketch planning, Mobile sources,
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University of Texas, Austin
Center for Transportation Research, 3208 Red River, Suite 200
Autsin, TX 78712-1075
USA
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Kockelman, Kara
Phone: (512) 471-0210
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