Technical Analysis Tools - Transportation & Land Use Analysis

What are transportation and land use analysis tools?

The Federal Highway Administration and some states require the identification of land use issues and impacts as part of the transportation planning process. Other regulations may require the analysis of issues such as induced growth impacts on the transportation system (i.e. the likelihood that a transportation investment will stimulate land development, which in turn adds traffic above and beyond forecasted levels).

These analysis requirements enforce the need to consider the integration between transportation and land use. Other sections of this toolkit contain planning and policy tools to integrate transportation and land use. This section presents analysis methods and software tools to measure the relationship between transportation and land use.

Why and where are they applied?

Increasingly, local, regional, and state transportation agencies of different sizes and geographic locations are recognizing the effects of this relationship and using analysis tools to measure the effects of land use on travel demand and vice versa. Like many other analysis tools, the level of detail in the results and complexity of the tool can vary. Growing areas can use scenario planning tools to forecast the implications of different development patterns. Connectivity and accessibility indices can be used to help plan multimodal networks that facilitate the most efficient use of new and existing transportation infrastructure.

Where can I get more information?