Transportation Plans: An Overview
by Greg Dale
A quick overview of transportation plans, from Level 1 long-range plans for Level 4 traffic impact studies
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Read first few paragraphs of article:
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Traffic impact studies for any site development are an important
part of the land use review process. As a planning commissioner,
the odds are good that you'll need to deal with them from time
to time. But before talking about traffic impact studies (which
will be the focus of my next column), it's important to
understand how these studies "fit" into the broader
transportation planning picture. Because of this, I want to take
a few minutes to provide you with an overview of transportation
plans.
There are four levels of concern involving traffic and
transportation issues:
Level 1: A long-range 25 year horizon for strategic planning of
major transportation corridors, land use patterns, and other
elements of the urban environment.
Level 2: An intermediate 10 - 20 year horizon for the planning
of significant changes in transportation facilities, and other
major infrastructure elements and land use patterns.
Level 3: A short-range 5 - 10 year horizon for planning and
programming major and minor transportation developments.
Level 4: Design and implementation of individual public works
projects and private developments.
Level 1 - Comprehensive, Continuous, and Coordinated ("3-C")
Transportation Plan
The traditional comprehensive area-wide transportation planning
process was first developed in the 1960s to evaluate alternative
land use and transportation plans. The process is designed to:
The 3-C process also provides information by which the
compatibility of future land use and transportation assumptions
can be evaluated. It is used to guage changes in accessibility
that would result with different transportation systems, and to
see if proposed commercial or industrial concentrations are
situated at locations which have, or will have, a high level of
capacity for traffic flow.
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