Supporting Transportation Planning in Small MPOs Through Partnerships and Innovative Methods

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) must develop and maintain transportation planning models to support a multitude of system decisions and transportation and land use policies. The main components of transportation planning models include: travel demand estimation, calibration, and network performance assessment. Evaluating the network performance is a straight forward process which compares estimated service levels to those established by each community. However, the model must be calibrated before future traffic levels are examined. Traffic counts on key routes usually receive great attention during calibration and they may trigger conflicts among state and local agencies. Estimating travel demand involves predicting the number of trips by activity. Although the basic principles used to estimate trips are straightforward, applying them to accurately capture trip making behavior gets to be a tricky endeavor. The availability and quality of local data may be the most critical obstacle that MPOs must face when estimating travel demand. This problem becomes even more acute in small MPOs which lack the resources to undertake significant primary travel data collection. The lack of data also impacts the ability to calibrate models to reflect an area’s unique characteristics and allow reliable future forecasts. Further, in many instances, the smaller MPOs lack the staff resources and expertise necessary to develop, run, and maintain transportation planning models. Many smaller MPOs have difficulty recruiting or retaining skilled transportation modelers. This paper presents an innovative approach that uses a partnership between academia, local, state, and federal transportation agencies to meet transportation modeling demands in North Dakota. The program consolidates all model development, enhancements, and maintenance at the Advanced Traffic Analysis Center (ATAC) at North Dakota State University, to maintain all travel demand models in North Dakota. Further, ATAC is the sole entity designated with the role of running models in support of various MPO, state DOT, and consultant needs. The paper discusses the approach to establishing the program, lessons learned, and challenges.