Transportation--Planning

Efficient freight mobility plays a major role in the economy, and its performance is closely related to the quality of the transportation system. Requirements for funding transportation infrastructure projects often do not specify the analytical tools planners should use to request funding. Critical Urban and Rural Freight Corridors are sections of the National Highway Freight Network providing critical connectivity of goods and must have improved system performance. This research study offers a method for identifying these corridors considering temporal and spatial inputs. For this end, a multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) was developed. This framework attributes a score to highway corridors (links) based on policy eligibility and prioritization. We apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to structure the problem and consider different stakeholder preferences and available data. The product of this study is a tool for decisionmakers to optimize the selection of critical freight corridors and analyze alternatives. It also offers flexibility to manipulate the framework to meet various agency goals, using the State of Florida as a case study.

Growth management grew as a concept and policy objective in the 1970s and 1980s. The interrelationships of the state and local governments changed when Florida developed growth policy and local government implemented the policy. Nine mandatory elements to be included in a local comprehensive plan and seven mandatory concurrency elements of the 1985 Florida Growth Management Act were expensive elements for local government to implement. As a result, the issue of funding the impacts of growth drove the growth management agenda, leaving the question of compliance. The question is: Did Florida local government comply with the transportation concurrency element of the Florida Growth Management Act? This dissertation analyzed five Florida counties and two Georgia counties to determine whether there was compliance with their respective state transportation policies. The study purposely looked at counties in different stages of growth to determine if the transportation requirements of the Florida Growth Management Act and the Georgia State Planning Act affected local budgets. Transportation is the most expensive element in local government budgets. Development orders would cease without the road capacity to carry the impact of proposed developments, making transportation the linchpin to state growth policies. A visual analysis and a multiple regression analysis were used to evaluate local government compliance with state transportation policy. A two-stage numerical evaluation was used for the visual analysis. The analysis looked for a slope change, a break in the trend, or both, after the impact of the intervention of the interrupted time series. A multiple regression analysis calculated the regression coefficient for a before and after dummy variable. The multiple regression removed the effects of population, interest rates, and road expenditure variables and isolated the effect of the dummy variable to determine local government compliance.