Transportation Impact Statement (TIS)—A New Tool for Transportation and Land-Use Planning

The authors advance a new approach to transportation and land-use planning: the transportation impact statement (TIS). Current planning practice suffers from a lack of understanding of and adequate tools to evaluate the complex relationships that exist between land use and transportation. Consequently, land-use development frequently overloads the transportation system. A TIS exposes the complex interdependencies with a multimodal and regional assessment of the impact of land-use development on the transportation system. The authors offer a theoretical background for this new approach and an empirical illustration of its potential use through a case study based on the city of Haifa in Israel. The objective of the study is to investigate the local and regional transport-related impacts of proposed land developments, thus improving the planning decisionmaking process. The impact of the proposed land developments on the transportation system was studied utilizing several transportation scenarios, including travel-demand management (TDM) strategies, using the metropolitan database and travel-demand modeling systems. The results show that the total number of trips generated by the proposed land developments is by far inconsistent with the capacity of the transportation network to accommodate all the forecasted demands under all transport scenarios. These results have a number of implications. First, TIS clearly improves our understanding of the impact of land development on the transportation system, and thus it should be utilized in decisionmaking regarding land-development strategy. Second, TIS stresses the importance of transit and TDM strategies as mitigation measures in the planning process. Third, TIS illustrates the need for a wider (that is, not site-related) planning perspective—including setting overall metropolitan goals and objectives.