Visualizing System-Wide Economic Impacts of Transportation Projects

Abstract

The economic evaluation of proposed transportation projects has traditionally been a technical process based on collected data and equations. Future needs must be considered to adequately meet the demands of system users. To ensure project success as political pressure forces transportation projects to be both beneficial and nonintrusive, transportation professionals must begin incorporating the public into every stage of a proposed project, including the economic analysis. This paper describes a streamlined process that brings together existing technologies to produce future needs estimates, perform the economic evaluation of the proposed solution, and display the costs and benefits. This process is performed in a geographic information system environment that enables the efficient storage and visualization of data, thereby increasing the efficiency of the economic evaluation as well as providing a venue to display results.