Sustainable Ways to Integrate Future Transportation (SWIFT) - A New Scenario Planning Tool for New Mobility 

Abstract
Urban Transportation is undergoing a rapid transformation due to technological innovation. These changes along with new trends in electronic commerce and delivery systems, modern shared work environments, housing preferences are all shaping mobility and transportation infrastructure in the modern cities. Additionally, planners and policy makers are facing ever increasing challenges: unsustainable urban growth; behavior for new generations; increasing vehicle miles travelled; and emerging vehicle and freight technologies. As such, relying solely on traditional transportation model to explore potential impacts and make planning decisions from a complex matrix of factors can be time-consuming and insufficient, with lack of a triple-bottom-line prediction on environmental, socio-economic, and other important matters.

Sustainable Ways to Integrate Future Transportation (SWIFT) uses a holistic data-driven methodology to evaluate future uncertainties in urban growth (high, medium, low), land use (sustainable growth vs. urban sprawl), transportation infrastructure, mobility policies (transit policies, transportation demand management, mobility pricing strategies), and emerging technologies (electric vehicles, connected and autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing, personal mobility, shared mobility, truck platooning, drone delivery, on-demand delivery). It is a scenario planning tool that enables planners and policy makers explore a wide range of scenarios of new mobility, model and evaluate their impacts, identify future trends and needs. It uses more than 20 key performance indicators (KPIs) across five performance areas (mobility, social, environmental, infrastructure, and economic) to comprehensively measure the performance of each scenarios, providing timely feedback to stakeholders to facilitate decision-making processes.

The SWIFT Tool comprises a Scenario Manager Module, a Land-use Allocation Module (LAM), a SWIFT Transportation Module (STM) and a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Module with an interactive Graphic User Interface (GUI). The LAM can predict sub-regional growth and land use changes in real time. The STM Fast Mode can quickly model and report key performance metrics at a sub-regional level. The STM Full Mode combines an enhanced demand estimation component to incorporate modeling emerging technologies and policies that is built upon the regional travel demand model in Cube and a regional Dynamic Traffic Assignment Model in DynusT. SWIFT GUI makes it easy to create, evaluate, and compare scenario options, allowing for iterative and collaborative planning while incorporating technological and policy innovation as one of its core principles.
SWIFT is applied to one of the fastest-growing areas northwest of the Houston region with approximately 621 square miles of land, 1.1 million residents, and 540 thousand jobs. The scenarios in SWIFT were developed based on long-term, holistic visions and goals for regional stakeholder groups and local agencies in the greater Houston area, along with various input combinations from growth, network, land use , technologies, and policies.