Developing Consistent Travel Demand Model Systems as a Building Block for Cooperative Planning: Case Study of San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is characterized by a diverse mixture of urban, suburban, and rural development patterns; multiple jurisdictions with local, state, and federal responsibilities; and a multiplicity of transportation system planners, owners, and operators. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the metropolitan planning organization for the region, is responsible for coordinating transportation for the nine-county region and has a sophisticated set of travel-demand models. California established county-level congestion management programs in 1990, including a requirement for travel-demand model consistency with the regional model. Coordination of the multiple travel-demand model systems that proliferated in the region thus became a significant issue. The cooperative planning approach promoted by MTC through the Bay Area Partnership, and the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, gave additional impetus to integrating transportation information from multiple agencies, including travel-demand model information. The development of an approach to establishing consistency between the travel-demand model systems in the San Francisco Bay Area is described, as are the immediate and subsequent strategies undertaken.