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CE 573 Transportation Planning - Fall 2001
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Class Overview Welcome to this class in transportation planning! Planning is one of the most important activities for transportation engineers. In this class, we will learn about some of the major planning activities undertaken by transportation engineers and members of interdisciplinary teams with which they work. We will learn to use some of the standard methods in highway capacity analysis, traffic impact analysis, travel demand forecasting, and origin-destination analysis. And, we will consider some of the important policy issues that guide governments in making decisions about transportation. We will start this class by reviewing some of the planning issues faced by engineers today. These issues are identified in a set of readings that you will be given the first day of class. One of your first assignments is to review these readings and prepare a summary based on a set of study questions that I will distribute. We will also discuss some of the transportation issues that are common in your home town or country. Next, during the second and third week of classes, we will see how transportation engineers and planners assess the performance of transportation facilities, introducing the concept of quality of service. From the perspective of the user of a facility, we will learn to assess the performance of bicycle and pedestrian facilities using a field survey and level of service measures that have been developed from previous research. In the fourth week of the class, we will assess the impact of constructing a new by-pass route in the City of Moscow. Currently, all traffic passing through the city must travel through downtown on State Highway 8 and/or U.S. Highway 95. We will conduct a license plate survey and use the results of this survey to help determine whether a by-pass route can be justified. Video students will not actually conduct the survey (unless you want to visit Moscow for a day in person!) but will use the data collected by the Moscow students. During the fifth week of classes, we will learn to use one of the planning methods of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) to conduct an analysis of the performance of a signalized intersection. While many of the techniques included in the HCM focus on the more detailed operational analysis in which an engineer needs to determine the details of a design, the planning methods provide rough estimates of the adequacy of a given design. In the sixth week, we will conduct a trip generation analysis for one site (for example, a new restaurant or a planned residential neighborhood) to determine some of the factors that affect the relationship between land-use and transportation. Trip generation analysis is the first step in the travel demand forecasting process. Trip generation rates are often related to land use intensity such as the number of persons that live in a residential area, the number of employees that work in an office building, or the square footage of a commercial site. Next, during week seven, we will learn how to represent the elements of a transportation system spatially using a network of links, nodes, and traffic analysis zones. The transportation network is a model or abstraction of reality, including only those elements that affect the operation and performance of the network, such as the capacity of the intersections, the traffic demand, and the vehicle speeds on the street segments. During the eighth week, we will determine the effect of a new development on the performance of an existing transportation system, using traffic impact analysis techniques. This analysis will integrate our work of the previous three weeks. Traffic impact analysis is often required by local or state governments as a means to assess fees imposed on developers to help to pay the costs of new infrastructure. During the next five weeks, we will study the elements of the travel demand forecasting process, including trip distribution, modal split, and traffic assignment. Trip distribution forecasts the number of trips between any two places, using called traffic analysis zones, using the gravity model. The gravity model is an analogue of the physical gravity model, which states the attraction between two bodies as a function of their masses and the distance between them. Modal split analysis uses information about relative travel time and cost to determine the proportion of trips between two places by each available mode, usually highways and transit. Traffic assignment determines the likely paths of travel for vehicles between two points based on travel times and costs. In the final two weeks of the semester, we will learn about demand and supply analysis in a transportation corridor. During a normal peak period in an urban area, demand often exceeds capacity. The temporal or spatial redistribution of demand that results from this oversaturation must be computed based on the capacity of a corridor and other factors. You can see from the variety of topics that we will cover that this will be an extremely busy next fifteen weeks! But I believe that the experiences that you will have during the class will provide you with a solid background in transportation planning. By the end of the class, you will have developed the following competencies:
I welcome you to join me in this journey of learning about transportation planning! |