Journal of Urban Planning and Development

In estimating the current and future demand for facilities, engineers and planners need to rationalize differences in facility demand by land‐use category. Using unweighted population and employment data to estimate facility needs may result in substantial error. The solution is to properly weight population and employment figures to create a common unit of measure, the functional population, defined as the number of people occupying space in the community on a 24 hr per day, seven‐day‐per‐week basis. By estimating the functional population of a community, estimations of current and future demand for certain facilities can be improved. This paper offers a reasonably convenient method for estimating the functional population for a current and future year. It applies the functional population concept to estimating the current and future demand for fire protection, police, emergency medical, jail and detention, courts, and government administration facilities for a hypothetical community.

Policymakers seem to prefer that sellers of buildable land pay development impact fees in the form of lower land prices, or that builders pay those fees in the form of lower profits. Developers assert that home buyers will pay fees in higher prices. Who really pays the fees? The economic incidence of impact fees is investigated in Sarasota County, Florida. Regression analysis shows that impact fees are positively associated with residential urban land prices. Positive capitalization of impact fees in the urban land market may be due to: (1) Land buyers bidding up land value because impact fees to be paid in the future ensure extension of essential services, thus making land values rise by the expectations of facility extension; (2) the predictability of fee payment, usually through explicit fee schedules; and (3) all the planning and capital programming required to make impact fees legally defensible that has the ultimate effect of ensuring developers of local governments' ability to accommodate development. On the whole, impact‐fee policy is a positive factor in the planning and development of urban areas.

In many urban‐planning, geographic analysis, and engineering studies, a classical problem is finding the shortest paths within a bounded area, or the best path that goes around or through special regions, called barriers. In this paper we present two algorithms for finding the shortest or best paths. The first one is designed to find the shortest Euclidean path in an area represented as a polygon. In this algorithm, we first select an arbitrary path between the two points, then modify this path until it is the shortest. Its computational complexity is proven to be superior to that of previous ones. The other algorithm is for finding the best path between two locations, using a rectilinear metric in the presence of penetrable barriers. To minimize both total travel time and cost, the route can either go around or through each barrier. When selecting the best path, multiple‐weighted criteria are used in the evaluation. Examples are presented to illustrate how these two algorithms work.