A Study on the Establishment of Transportation Planning Areas

The transportation planning area is defined as a spatial scope for transportation planning, which affects socio-economic activities such as commuting, shopping, etc. Until now, the transportation planning area has been established based on the transportation affecting areas of the central city of a metropolitan area. As a result, it is difficult to make transportation plans considering travel patterns between two associated regions in the metropolitan area. This study re-established transportation planning areas considering the O/D based travel patterns between two adjacent regions. It shows several characteristics as follows. Firstly, the transportation planning areas tend to expand in the unit of mid-sized traffic zone as the city size increases. Secondly, the transportation planning areas tend to expand extensively along the traffic corridors containing major highways and rails. And, the commuting areas correspond to attending school districts in small and mid-sized cities. To prove them, the questionnaire survey was performed for transportation officials in 60 cities nation-wide. The survey results show that the transportation planning areas based on the travel patterns mostly correspond to those based on the questionnaire survey in small and mid-sized cities. However, the ratio of coincidence can be between 50 and 60 percentage in large cities. The study results can be utilized for the re-establishment of transportation planning areas. And, also they can be used as basic data for dividing identical school groups.