Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Urban travel modeling techniques have not found widespread use in small urban communities because traditional forecasting models, designed for use in large urban cities, are very data intensive. In recent years, however, there has been a greater awareness of transportation problems occurring in small urban areas, which are generally defined as communities with a population less than 50,000. Previous transportation planning research efforts directed towards small urban areas have identified the need for planning techniques that are less data intense and less expensive to implement when compared with traditional transportation modeling methods. This paper presents an application of the urban transportation planning processes that has limited data collection and cost requirements, developed specifically for application in smaller urban areas. The data requirements are reduced through the use of a single internal trip purpose based on the total number of households and businesses in each traffic analysis zone. This single trip purpose forecasting technique was used to develop travel models for 18 Alabama cities with populations ranging between 5,000 and 55,000. Validation and analysis of the travel models show that the single internal trip purpose presented in this paper can accurately be used to forecast traffic in smaller areas without extensive data collection efforts.

Park-and-ride facilities are a valuable transportation systems management technique to combat congestion problems in and around city centers. It is therefore important for engineers and planners to determine their optimal location. Past research has identified many criteria that are relevant to optimal park-and-ride locations. But, although one criterion may carry more or less significance than another, they have always been considered on an equal scale. Furthermore, there is currently no system to use the existing knowledge and experience to aid planners in deciding the optimum location of a park-and-ride facility. In this project, a hybrid knowledge-based expert system/geographic information system tool was developed to help determine the optimal location for park-and-ride facilities. The tool was tested twice—on a set of hypothetical roadways and on another set of actual locations throughout the state of Delaware. In both cases, the program was successfully able to identify the same location that the selected expert engineers/planners chose as the optimal location for a park-and-ride facility given a set of potential sites.

In Japan, the number of houses available exceeds the demand in all prefectures. Improving housing quality has gained importance over building new dwelling stock. The thrust of housing policies and programs in Japan is to improve housing quality. Housing quality is a very loosely defined term, and there is no consensus in the housing literature on its measurement. The present paper proposes the use of the hedonic approach to estimate a quantifiable measure of housing quality in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region (TMR). The objective of this paper is to compare housing quality in the five prefectures of the TMR and among six tenures of housing choice. The results indicate that the condition of rental housing in general is poor.