Windowed Transportation Planning Model

D. M. Levinson, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif. 94720. Y. Huang, Transportation Planning Division, Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 8787 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Md. 20910. A transportation planning model that integrates regional and local-area forecasting approaches is developed and applied. Although regional models have the scope to model the interaction of demand and congestion, they lack spatial detail. Local-area analysis typically does not consider the feedback between new project loadings and existing levels of traffic. A windowed model, which retains regional trip distribution information and the consistency between travel demand and congestion, permits the use of a complete transportation network and block-level traffic zones while retaining computational feasibility. By combining the two methods a number of important policy issues can be addressed, including the implications of traffic calming, changes in flow due to alternative traffic operation schemes, the influence of microscale zoning changes on nearby intersections, and the impact of travel demand management on traffic congestion.