PREDICTING EFFECTIVENESS OF TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM MANAGEMENT MEASURES

Transportation planning is moveing into an era in which the object is to manage the existing system rather than to expand the present facilities. Most transportation planning tools, however, were designed for the latter task. Consequently, many planners are foregoing quantitative analyses when developing plans for management of the transportation system while awaiting the development of new forecasting and analysis tools. This paper reports on a recent study in the Washington, D.C., area that was oriented toward evaluating various measures for possible inclusion in a revised transportation control plan to achieve air-quality standards and used existing models to analyze a wide variety of transportation policy and low-cost improvement measures. The study did not demonstrate that not further model development is needed, but it did show that the quantitative information needed for the development of transportation system management plans can be obtained from existing models. /Authors/