With the use of pre- and postdeployment onboard surveys conducted in May 2008 and May 2009, the effect of the Miami, Florida, Urban Partnership Agreement (UPA) project (I-95 Express Lanes) on user perceptions of the corridor's I-95 Express bus service was assessed. Because the majority of 95 Express bus users are commuters who use the service in both directions and only the northbound direction had been improved by the Express Lanes at the time of the study presented in this paper, the project's effect on user perceptions was significant. Although the service was already highly rated, the service's ratings have increased further, with travel time and service reliability ratings improving by margins that were statistically significant at the 99% and 95% confidence level, respectively. These margins relate directly to the improvements in travel conditions brought about by the UPA project. Despite these enhanced performance perceptions, responses to other survey questions showed that mode shifts to transit because of the Express Lanes project have been negligible to date. This finding is consistent with the findings of the Florida Department of Transportation study, which showed that transit mode share remained relatively unchanged between 2008 and 2009.
In 2016, Montgomery County, Maryland revamped the approach with which the planning department reviews transportation impacts of site development. The development of the 2017 Local Area Transportation Review Guidelines included a comprehensive and collaborative review of alternative approaches to growth management and resulted in the development of more robust and multimodal analytic approaches, a set of context-sensitive and multimodal trip generation rates, and a commitment to continue the development of pro-rata share districts in lieu of traditional traffic impact studies. The 2017 guidelines were developed with the benefit of a review of contemporary best practices nationwide and a 30-person working group representing various transportation impact review stakeholder interests that convened 21 times over the course of 3 years. The new approach was developed to balance three potentially competing objectives: streamline the process in smart growth areas of the county, increase the degree of multimodalism, and increase the degree of robustness in the analytic approach and data. The key additions to the process included establishing policy area groupings based on transportation demand characteristics; developing a set of context-sensitive, multimodal trip generation rates; and introducing quantitative tests for non-auto impacts. This paper highlights both the process and outcomes of the updated approach.
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