Strategic Modeling Tools to Initiate the LRTP Process 

Date and Time: 8/30/2022
Location: North Star

Presenter: Jonathan Slason, Director, RSG

  

 

 

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

The combined use of strategic planning modeling tools and performance-based planning has provided MPOs and cities valuable and cost-effective transportation planning that is being used to inform long range planning and transitions toward greater sustainability and more resilient transportation infrastructure.

RSG has successfully used VisionEval - a newly available open source strategic transportation planning tool for three recent clients that are using the findings in a variety of ways to progress their own planning efforts. NYSERDA in New York partnered with the Ithica region and the Albany Capital District MPOs on exploring what future effects electrification, automation, transit supply, and other supply effects of changing investment priorities. In Vermont, RSG used the VisionEval platform to inform the nationally cutting edge - Net Zero Energy plan for the City of Burlington. The plan evaluates the net energy savings of shifting to electric vehicles but also the savings by changing land use patterns, improving walking and biking facilities, increasing the transit supply, enhancing TDM efforts, as well as imposing a price on carbon.

The application of the VisionEval software combined with more traditional scenario planning processes paired with the awareness of MPOs targets using performance-based planning gives a holistic way to explore a wide number of various routes to reduce VMT, improve safety, and respond to various external forces in a cost-effective way upstream of any more significant applications of regional travel demand models.

The success of this system is to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders and explore a large number of pathways toward meeting goals and objectives before the more detailed and time consuming modeling and analysis occurs. This gives a high ROI to this planning effort.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Slason, PE is a Director in RSG’s Planning Applications Practice. Based in their Burlington, Vermont office he has provided professional engineering and planning consulting services to public and private clients for over fifteen years. He has worked both nationally and internationally on mixed use land use projects, the design and demand for multi-modal capacity, and has developed several fair share contribution systems to fund local transportation improvements in addition to municipal and statewide impact fee systems in Florida and the Northeast. Jonathan has combined his degrees in economics and civil engineering to assist communities and states develop comprehensive funding solutions. He currently is leading on-going multimodal impact fees designed to support shifts away from vehicular LOS and in support of reduced household VMT. That work has complemented Jonathan’s leading work on the application of strategic models to support long range planning efforts for MPOs and DOTs. Jonathan has assisted clients identify pathways toward decarbonization, effects of electrifying the transportation system, and develop innovative methods of quantified exploratory scenario planning in the face of deep uncertainty. He currently is assisting FHWA to enhance the VisionEval platform by improving its functionality and broaden the type of applications that it can support.