Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Impact fees are charges paid by developers to defray the costs of capital improvements made necessary by development. The charges are based on the impact a development has on a facility. Fees should be set to cover costs and ensure consistent charges to different developments and over time. The relationship between the fee and usage can be determined to meet these objectives. When several developments occur simultaneously on a congested network or where there are alternative paths between origin and destinations, there are no normative methods for attributing the traffic on a facility to a particular development. This paper describes a consistent approach to setting impact fees based on transportation planning procedures, highway cost allocation methods, and entropy maximization. This approach determines the most likely allocation of link volumes to developments given the origin‐destination matrix and equilibrium flows. The method is demonstrated through its application to a simplified network model of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area.

Property‐value guarantees (PVGs) by the proponent of a waste facility may be an effective tool to compensate nearby property owners if the facility impacts property values adversely. A review of the theory, and of 13 empirical property‐value studies, shows inconsistent results. For a thorough test, physicalimpact analyses and property‐value‐differential analyses are carried out at two typical waste facilities, a landfill and an incinerator. However, no significant effects of observed physical impacts on property sales prices are shown to be present. The insignificant results are possibly caused by the violation of three crucial assumptions: Buyers are usually not perfectly informed about facility impacts; buyers may be less sensitive to the impacts; offsetting property‐value increases may occur due to development in the host community. Further, sellers may prefer to hold out, refuse to sell, or wait longer to sell for a better price. Property‐value decreases are, therefore, inaccurate indicators for facility impacts or host community opposition. Hence, if property‐value guarantees are effective in gaining the acceptance of the host community, it is because they address fears about facility impacts rather than compensate for objectively measurable property‐value losses.

Many theoretical and operational methods have been developed to identify optimal land‐use allocation strategies. In general, it is possible to classify these models into single land‐use allocation (SLUA) and multiple land‐use allocation (MLUA) problems. SLUA models are characterized by their combinatorial nature and consideration of conflicting objectives. This research is concerned with the development of a multiobjective SLUA model that extends current models and addresses several of their drawbacks.