This report from the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2), which is administered by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, explores the underlying relationships among households, firms, and travel demand. The report also describes a regional scenario planning tool that can be used to evaluate the impacts of various smart growth policies.

"TRB's second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Report S2-C16-RR-1: Effect of Smart Growth Policies on Travel Demand explores the underlying relationships among households, firms, and travel demand. The report also describes a regional scenario planning tool that can be used to evaluate the impacts of various smart growth policies. " -- Publisher's description

In recent years, there is an increasing trend to promote smart growth strategies that aim to revitalize land-use and transportation patterns to avoid "sprawl" and to replace it by safe, livable, healthy, environmentally-sound and green-mode-oriented communities. All these interests point to the genuine need for travel demand forecasting methods and traffic analysis tools sensitive enough to reflect the benefits of smart growth strategies. In this context, this paper takes the initiative to develop an enhanced travel demand forecasting method to evaluate the impact of smart growth strategies on travel demand. The enhanced travel demand forecasting framework is tested by using the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Area as the study case. In this framework, several behavior choice models are developed in order to capture the impact of smart growth land use on individual travellers' various travel decisions such as intrazonal trip making, destination choices, and mode choices. As found, dense and diverse land use will encourage the usage of non-motorized modes such as bicycle and walking while reducing automobile travels. In addition, diverse land uses and transit-oriented designs play an important role in reducing the average trip length and vehicle miles travelled.

This policy focus report complements a larger volume that compares four states with smart growth programs (Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, and Oregon) and four other states without such programs (Colorado, Indiana, Texas, and Virginia). The analysis reveals that programs vary greatly across the four smart growth states, producing a range of outcomes that overlap with some of those in the other states.

TRB's second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Capacity Project C16 has released the SmartGAP User's Guide. SmartGAP is a scenario planning software tool that synthesizes households and firms in a region and determines their travel demand characteristics based on their built environment and transportation policies. SHRP 2 Capacity Project C16 has also released a report titled Effect of Smart Growth Policies on Travel Demand that explores the underlying relationships among households, firms, and travel demand. The report also describes a regional scenario planning tool that can be used to evaluate the impacts of various smart growth strategies on travel demand.