A methodology to project and evaluate the potential land use impacts of a proposed limited-access highway extension in the rochester, new york, metropolitan area is described. The analysis, the results of a 1-year consultant study for the new york state urban development corporation and local sponsors, examined the potential impacts of linking the towns of brockport and albion, west of rochester, to the rochester central business district (cbd) via an extension of route 531. An important constraint that affected the selection of assessment methodologies was the relatively modest amount of time and resources available for the study. This type of resource constraint, which was probably the norm for planning studies, precluded the development of a grand land use/transportation modeling effort in the style of the national bureau of economic research study, puget sound, orbay area simulation pioneered several decades earlier. It required instead the use of methodologies or models that would not require enormous amounts of data, time, or effort to calibrate. The approach used to project potential residential location decisions was to develop a gravity model of residential location. In general, gravity models, when applied to residential location, require calculation of accessibility index scores for subareas that are then used to reallocate a region-wide growth projection to the subareas. The key advantageof this approach was that it was sensitive to changes in travel times between residential zones and major employment nodes. A qualitative approach was used to evaluate business impacts. The basic methodology involved a review of the competitive advantages of the area with and without the highway extension that included surveys of businesses inside and outside the brockport-albion corridor. A separate region-wide marketing analysis was performed to assess retail development possibilities in the brockport-albion corridor. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1274, Transportation and economic development 1990: proceedings of a conference, williamsburg, virginia, november 5-8, 1989.
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