Planning Analysis Toolbox for Small Urban Areas in North Carolina

The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) develops analysis tools for use in the evaluation of transportation plans, the calculation of project-level travel forecasts, and for use in air quality analysis. The development of these tools can be costly and time consuming. In most cases a similar approach to model development is applied across the board, irrespective of the size of the community or the transportation issues or policies that need to be evaluated in a given community. This approach can lead to an over investment of time and resources in some models and an under investment of time and resources for other models. To create a more efficient and consistent analysis process NCDOT sponsored research to develop a set of best practice guidelines for transportation planning analysis for various sized communities across North Carolina. The research focused on North Carolina communities whose populations ranged from under 5,000 up to 50,000. In addition to community size, various transportation and community issues were considered. The premise of the research is that such issues, as well as study area size and population should determine the type and complexity of the travel forecasting tools. To test this premise the research team evaluated several forecasting tools and techniques including trend line analysis, a manual allocation approach, and a North Carolina Quick Response (NC-QRM) method. This paper provides an overview of the analysis tools and techniques recommended by the researchers for communities with population less than 50,000. In addition to an introduction of the analysis tools, the paper presents two planning approaches that can supplement the forecasting tools and two decision support systems that can assist the analyst in the selection of tools most appropriate to meet the needs of their community.