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Executive summary This pilot planning study has been funded by a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Section 5311 grant through the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Division of Mass Transportation to improve online travel information dissemination and help travelers utilize connections between transportation services. The Shasta County Regional Transportation Planning Agency (SCRTPA) is the lead agency. This project is to test and study integrating rural and small-urban public transit service schedule and geographic information into Google Maps/Transit. The study area includes nine California counties in Northern and Eastern California. SCRTPA selected Trillium Solutions with Nelson-Nygaard Consulting Associates, Inc. to conduct a pilot implementation of the Google Transit trip planner for selected agencies within the study area and determine the feasibility of Google Transit. The assessment of Google Transit feasibility regards its ability as a customer information…

This research project aims to explore how smaller cities can develop and apply a range of innovative technologies to promote the use of public transport (PT). The transportation sector has proven to be particularly difficult territory for the advancement of sustainable development (Goldman & Gorham, 2006). Rapidly increasing traffic congestion, air pollution, and urban sprawl are causing considerable problems in contemporary cities (IEA, 2002). In turn, this is having detrimental effects on the earth’s climate, human health, and is compounding the potentially disastrous impacts of peak oil (IPCC, 2007; WHO, 2007; Bailey, 2006).

Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity— the per capita invention rate—is positively related to the density of employment in the highly urbanized portion of MAs. All else equal, a city with twice the employment density (jobs per square mile) of another city will exhibit a patent intensity (patents per capita) that is 20 percent higher. Patent intensity is maximized at an employment density of about 2,200 jobs per square mile. A city with a more competitive market structure or one that is not too large (a population less than 1 million) will also have a higher patent intensity. These findings confirm the widely held view that the nation’s densest locations play an important role in creating the flow of ideas that generate innovation and growth.

In the past ten years, integrated land use and transportation modeling has received considerable attention in the scholarly literature. This academic interest is slowly yielding practical applications. Many metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and state departments of transportation are beginning to implement these types of models for the first time. While many improvements have been made to these models, and the value of these improvements should not be understated, much work still remains. One of the most challenging problems in land use modeling is how floorspace (buildings) is built and occupied. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to draw attention to insufficiencies in the representation of floorspace developer behavior—particularly as it applies to large, urban-edge projects—within current integrated land use and transportation models and, second, to determine the necessity of explicitly accounting for such projects within these models.

This article sets out to highlight some of the major elements of fixed guideway and railroad electrification systems, and to point out what transportation planners should be aware of as they evaluate alternatives for new public transportation projects in their communities. While planners continue to debate the cost effectiveness of rail transit as a force in urban development and land use, in those cases where rail transit is a viable option, electrification inevitably is a factor, whether one is considering streetcars, light rail, heavy-rail, commuter rail or even BRT systems.

This paper discusses spatial autocorrelation in mode choice models, including what kind of bias it introduces and how to remedy the problem. The research shows that a spatially autocorrelated mode choice model, not uncommon because of, in terms of transit characteristics homogeneous neighborhoods, systematically overestimates transit trips from suburban transit-unfriendly areas and underestimates transit trips in the transit-friendly city center. Adding a spatial lag term into the model specification avoids the bias, however, it also changes sampling approaches, requires higher quality household forecast data and complicates forecasting.

This study is an extension of previous research that uses the Envisioning tool to identify neighborhood characteristics that would be important for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) developers and planners. The term TOD is used to describe land use development specifically designed to take advantage of close proximity to good public transit. An explosion of Internet information and means of displaying data, such as school test scores, crime statistics, and real estate listings using tools such as smart geographic information system-based maps, can be used to examine potential sites from both planning and development perspectives.