Lead Presenter Biography

Dalia Leven has 17 years of experience planning for the future of multimodal mobility. Her work focuses on transit planning and analysis, travel demand forecasting, and planning for emerging transportation technologies and their impacts on travel behavior. Based in DC, Dalia leads Cambridge Systematics’ transit planning practice area, helping clients around the country tackle their toughest planning projects. She has managed consultant teams redesigning regional bus systems, developed regional long range plans, and conducted multimodal corridors studies across the country. Throughout her work, Ms. Leven uses her unique expertise to combine the technical areas of modeling, planning, and engineering to distill highly technical analysis to decision-makers and the public in a way that is understandable and useful.

Co-Authors

Presentation Description

Uncertainty is a part of long-range transportation planning; it is impossible to know precisely what the future will look like as transportation technologies, preferences, and options evolve over time. Traditional long-range planning and travel demand forecasting have been built around the assumption that this evolution would be a slow process, and that future behaviors would look similar to current and past behaviors. Sometimes, however, evolution takes a more dramatic pace and disrupts the transportation system so completely, that these assumptions may no longer be valid.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) is finalizing an update to TransAction, the long-range transportation plan for Northern Virginia. This update is incorporating the uncertainty into the planning process to ensure that TransAction and any subsequent funding decisions account for the uncertainty of these types of disruptions. By analyzing multiple potential future scenarios, NVTA can ensure that the TransAction Plan is nimble enough to absorb these disruptions by understanding how they might change travel behaviors and transportation needs and opportunities across Northern Virginia. This analysis will also allow the Authority to make wise investment decisions, ensuring that the projects that NVTA funds will be good investments regardless of how the future plays out.

TransAction used scenario analysis to better understand the potential for disruption and uncertainty. In addition to a “standard” forecast of the future in 2045, this scenario analysis analyzed three “alternate” futures that incorporate one or more plausible behavioral, technological, or policy disruptions that could have significant impacts on individual travel choices and the operation of the multimodal transportation network in the future. The three scenarios include:

1. Post-Pandemic “New Normal” in which many of the behavioral changes observed during the COVID-19 pandemic continue into the future. The scenario assumes reductions of work-related and shopping trips, an increase in delivery trips and an increase in non-motorized trips.
2. Advanced Transportation Technology focuses on implementation of Connected, Automated, Shared, Electric (CASE) Vehicles. In addition, the scenario includes changes in operating costs for automated vehicles, increases in effective roadway capacity, and automated transit shuttles.
3. Transportation Incentives/Pricing focuses on policy strategies to shift travel behavior, including VMT pricing on all roads with discounts for lower-income households, increases in parking costs, and free transit.

Each of these scenarios was analyzed using a multi-resolution model developed for NVTA. Each scenario was modeled by identifying a set of assumptions that represent a plausible set of conditions for 2045. Each scenario was analyzed for a No-Build run and a Build run (based on the TransAction Build network which includes the 400+ projects in the TransAction plan). These runs were analzed across multiple performance measures, including: vehicle-miles of travel (VMT), transit trips, person-hours of delay, congestion severity, access to employment, and tailpipe emissions.

The presentation will outline the assumptions associated with each of the scenarios and the modeling results for both the Build and No-Build analyses as compared to the standard forecasts for 2045. 

Presentation File