jmarca/kr-challenge

Public Planning Models

The idea behind the Public Planning Models project is to develop a set of tools and conventions that will allow government agencies of all sizes to share their planning models with the public.

Planning models---the bundle of computer code and trip matrices that estimate when, where, and how people and goods move about--- are at the heart of many of the decisions made by local and regional governments. Unfortunately, planning models by and large are terrible. This isn't the fault of planners or the academics who invent the models, but rather is more a case of poor or missing data use to develop and calibrate the models.

One way to "fix" the lack of data is to collect more of it. But fielding a travel survey is incredibly expensive and labor intensive. Most states will fund such a survey once every ten years, to augment the US Census data. Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) might kick in more money to a state-wide survey in order to piggyback on the larger effort and improve coverage of their particular area, but it is rare that an MPO will fund their own survey. This means that decisions are made based on old data measuring old travel behavior.

In this day and age of iPhones and Android phones, we believe we can do better than this. But it isn't enough to develop a smartphone app that tracks GPS over a few days and uploads the data to a database. This is the same as a travel survey, and will require the same level of expense and effort to administer.

We propose making planning and data collection and two-way conversation between local and regional governments and the public. Instead of people volunteering their information into a black box, our proposed system will let people see what the local planning model believes they are doing (in the aggregate) and offer corrections and suggestions.

All politics are local, and so we will illustrate our approach with a local example. Suppose a multiplex has closed in a strip mall, and the property owners want to replace the multiplex with either a department store or a senior center. Both types of land use will require the same square footage for the facility, but they will have very different usage patterns. Currently, the planning commission for the city might request traffic impact studies and will hold a few hearing for community input, but by and large the process of selecting which of the new tennants gets approved is opaque.

With our proposed system in place, community residents would be able to see the traffic flow patterns and expected trips generated by each project. Each traffic analysis zone will have a projected number of trips to and from other zones, and people will be able to see if their own trips are reflected in those patterns. The would be able to see the baseline case---how traffic patterns are now---and would be able to insert their own origins and destinations into the mix if necessary. Then they would be able to see the projected year's traffic patterns, and adjust their trips according to the projected trip times and delays. For the department store plan, a household might indicate that they would shop there once a week, but would never visit the senior center, whereas another household might anticipate walking to the senior center every day.

The trick is to establish the two-way communication system. We want to establish a generic front end to the leading planning model systems, relying on convention over customization, and then create a method to translate citizen input into anonymized data that will feed into the basic input and calibration steps of the planning process.