Evaluating the Design of the Streamlined GIS-Based Transportation Corridors

Geographic Information Systems and Multi-Criteria Decision Making provide methods that may be leveraged to modernize the transportation corridor planning process. In current transportation planning decision making processes, more factors and attributes are being considered than in the past decades. Context sensitive design, smart growth, and sustainability have become key factors in the planning and design of modern transportation projects. However, most corridor planning projects follow the well-known routine of traditional, manual-oriented approaches. The traditional corridor planning project employs trustworthy methods for identifying alignment alternatives, accepted practices for constraint assessment, and standard field methods for quantifying environmental impacts, all of which are analyzed per NEPA guidelines. Therefore, the benefits possible through innovations in methods and data must be compelling in value as well as adequate to the goals and policies of transportation planning. This paper compares and quantifies the performance matching of auto-generated highway alignment alternatives derived from remote sensing and spatial information through automated GIS processing relative to the horizontal location of linear features of the final alignment selected for I-269 around Memphis, TN. The focus is on horizontal matching because the application is designed to avoid locations of sensitive environmental features as opposed to optimizing horizontal and vertical aspects of highway geometric design. The analysis of linear feature matching and performance evaluation was performed in two steps: by distance and by the area occupied by the corridor. The results show up to 95% in similarity between the lengths of the corridors generated from automatic approach in comparison to the reference corridor. In the best case scenario we found 92% matching between the 1000-foot right-of-way corridors of the innovative approach and the I-269. Furthermore, when smoothing is applied to the automatically-generated alignment it can be shown to almost exactly correspond to the human-derived line features. Linear correspondence analysis conducted at the end of the process suggests that automatically generated “cost-path” alignments, when adjusted for smoothed curves, closely approximate the design of a final roadway alignment.