Comprehensive Evaluation of Transportation Projects: A Toolkit for Sketch Planning

A quick-response project-planning tool can be extremely valuable in anticipating the congestion, safety, emissions, and other impacts of large-scale network improvements and policy implementations. This report identifies the advantages and limitations of existing methods and toolkits for sketch-planning project evaluation. The report also describes the design and application of a new project evaluation toolkit, to assist transportation agencies and their consultants in the project planning phase. The toolkit is a spreadsheet-based application that offers users a familiar and powerful data manipulation interface for evaluation of abstracted networks’ improvements and modifications, versus a base case scenario, relying largely on traffic counts. The toolkit includes a travel demand prediction module for destination, mode, time of day and route choices, across multiple user classes and implemented as a set of external C++ programs. The toolkit estimates vehicle emissions using an extensive spreadsheet database of EPA’s MOBILE 6.2 emissions rates. Crash rates come from Texas-based models, and changes in traveler/consumer surplus (versus base case scenarios) are estimated using the Rule of Half. Estimates of link reliability also are available, and can be included in comprehensive benefit-cost metrics, which discount future impacts over time. The toolkit enables planners to comprehensively yet quickly anticipate and analyze the various impacts of diverse network improvement strategies.

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