Abstract:
Olathe, Kansas is a suburban community of approximately 50,000 persons. Olathe’s Capital Improvement Plan previously identified roadway improvement projects in an arbitrary manner. Points will be made on how a travel demand model helped City Staff identify short and long-term transportation deficiencies. Additionally, focus will be placed on measures of effectiveness which were easily understood by City Staff, City Council and the public. Travel demand models are an effective means of estimating future travel demand. However, these models fall short of allowing planners to analyze, manipulate and display the data in a meaningful way. It is also sometimes difficult to estimate transportation needs based on land uses and development that constantly changes. A discussion will be presented on the development of a link between Olathe’s GIS (ARCVIEW) and their travel demand model (TMODEL2), and how it allowed planners to exchange valuable data between the model and take advantage of GIS capabilities. Land use data, stored in the GIS, can be adjusted to develop and test different land use scenarios. This data can be uploaded to the travel demand model for quick and easy analysis. In addition, travel demand data generated by the model can be downloaded to the GIS for more thoughtful analysis and display of model output. The link between the travel demand model and the city’s GIS is a unique tool that has been developed using ESRI’s ARCVIEW Avenue programming language in combination with visual basic programming language. With this new tool, travel demand model data is now more accessible and usable to a wide range of city staff. Providing a link between the city’s travel demand model and their GIS allowed planners and engineers increased efficiency in problem solving. Thus, decision-makers were presented more meaningful data and clearer solutions. A discussion will focus on providing real world application examples used by Olathe engineers and planners which illustrate clear solutions to local problems.
