Assessing pedestrian impacts of future land use and transportation scenarios

Abstract

Portland Central City has experienced growth in population and employment over the last decades, which leads to an increase in travel demand. One of the visions of the Central City 2035 plan is to encourage walking. This paper presents a model of pedestrian travel demand to help assess the impact of land use and transportation policies in the Central City area. The model is an enhanced version of the Model of Pedestrian Demand (MoPeD). Realistic scenarios and the projected population and employment are incorporated in this study. Four future scenarios for 2035 are tested and compared to 2010 base conditions. The results suggest that demographic growth and job increases can help to encourage a large share of walk trips. Pedestrian behavior is also sensitive to network connectivity, but the influence is not as impactful compared to population and job growth. Furthermore, model results show that a good street network and a dense and diverse land-use plan can maximize the effects of promoting walk trips. This paper presents the capability of the pedestrian planning tool MoPeD. It is sensitive to the small-scale variations in local land use and transport development, which can help policymakers better understand the effects of various demographic policies and infrastructure planning on the walk share.