Estimating Societal Benefits and Costs of Transportation Demand Management

The 2006 Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program Interim Guidance (CMAQ) provides explicit guidelines to program effectiveness assessment and benchmarking by calling for a quantification of benefits, as well as disbenefits, resulting from emission reduction strategies for project selection and evaluation of transportation demand management (TDM) initiatives. To address this issue, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) commissioned a study with the objective of developing a model that permits program managers and funding agencies like FDOT to make informed decisions on where to spend finite resources based on a full range of benefits and costs. In this paper we summarize the design and development of a spreadsheet application called TRIMMS (Trip Reduction Impacts of Mobility Management Strategies). The model combines academic and practitioner experiences within a theoretical framework that truly captures consumers’ price responsiveness to diverse transportation options by embracing the most relevant trade-offs faced under income, modal price and availability constraints. We show that TRIMMS, while retaining comparability and consistency with other benefit-to-cost methods, allows TDM programs across the U.S. using local data or opting for default values from national research findings, and calculating the costs and benefits of a given program. A key strength of this model is its wide range of impact measures that can be selected for the analysis that go beyond currently available spreadsheet applications, mostly limited to air quality improvement assessment.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Concas, Sisinnio
  • Winters, Philip L
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2008-1-13 to 2008-1-17
• Date: 2008

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 21p
• Monograph Title: TRB 87th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air pollution; Air quality; Benefit cost analysis; Decision making; Mode choice; Pollutants; Pricing; Spreadsheets; Transportation policy; Travel demand; Travel demand management
• Identifier Terms: Florida Department of Transportation
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01090942
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 08-2651
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Mar 31 2008 8:03AM