TRANSPORTATION PLANNING FOR SMALL URBAN AREAS

The initial focus of this research was to develop a simplified transportation planning process for small urban areas of less than 250,000 population that is sufficiently flexible so that travel forecasts can be based on a small sample home-interview survey or simulation. It was found that the existing standardized procedures were incompatible with the possible variations in the nature of the problems, available resources and expectations of the participants. The need for a customization of planning procedures was established and the current organizational framework and technical practices in both land use and transportation planning were evaluated from that standpoint. Land use planning in small communities was found to be highly standardized in format and content, but not in procedures, which varied significantly in terms of sophistication. The transportation planning procedures appeared to be relatively more standardized. The research identified and presented four types of transportation planning techniques for application in small urban areas: (a) network simulation based on synthetic models and a small sample household survey, (b) consumer-oriented transit planning procedure, (c) simple techniques for corridor analysis, and (d) hand-computation oriented procedure for estimating localized impacts of major traffic generators. Under each category existing techniques were reviewed and tested (to varying levels).