Smart growth policies are often considered by planning agencies as a strategy to reduce congestion, emissions and other impacts on travel demand, but most of the current planning application tools are not sufficiently sensitive to the aspects of smart growth policies needed to determine travel demand. This project reviewed available research to determine the underlying relationships between households, firms and travel demand and then turned these relationships into a regional scenario planning tool that can be used to evaluate the impacts of various smart growth policies. The Smart Growth Area Planning (SmartGAP) tool synthesizes households and firms in a region and determines the travel demand characteristics of these households and firms based on the characteristics of their built environment and transportation policies affecting their travel behaviour. The software has been developed with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to allow non-technical users to be able to use the tool for planning activities more easily. Three pilot tests were completed to demonstrate the usefulness and reasonableness of SmartGAP to evaluate how smart growth policies affect travel demand, environmental, financial and economic, location and community impacts. (Author/publisher)
Abstract