Improving Land Use Forecasting for Medium-Size Metropolitan Planning Organizations In Virginia

About the project:

Travel demand forecasting is the art of predicting the future desire, for and hence future need for, transportation infrastructure.   Forecasts of future land use activity, in the form of population and employment, are a critical input into regional travel demand forecasts.  These forecasts of land use activity are the responsibility of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).  This project will (1) survey land use forecasting procedures in a sample of Virginia MPOs, (2) evaluate the accuracy of the projections for a sample of MPOs, and (3) review best practices in the literature.  From these three tasks, useful practices for making land use forecasts shall be identified.  Results of this research should be useful to medium (and possibly smaller) MPOs that have an interest in improving such processes but do not have the staff sizes of larger MPOs.

Project Team

Co-Principal Investigators

Other Investigators