Transportation for Communities - Advancing Projects Through Partnerships

SHRP C11 Project Kicks Off -- Development of Improved Economic Analysis Tools

SHRP2 C11: Development of Improved Economic Analysis Tools

The new C11 project in the SHRP2 Capacity program was kicked off on March 10, 2011. The goal of the project is to develop improved economic analysis tools to support the early and middle stages of transportation decision making, such as long range planning, the initial stages of corridor planning, and programming.

The objectives of the project fall into three key categories:

• To provide practical research culminating in a suite of tools that can be used to help assess
the economic development impact of highway investments;

• To provide practical guidance, protocols and frameworks for economic impact and related
performance measurement associated with highway project investments;

• To provide practical insight enabling integration of this study with other SHRP2 capacity and
reliability projects.

The C11 project grew out of recommendations provided by the C03 project: Interactions between Transportation Capacity, Economic Systems, and Land Use. The C03 project involved creating a large database of case studies of highway projects in the US that have had a significant impact on the regional economy and on land development. The impacts of each project were estimated by comparing pre-construction and post-construction operational, economic, and land use data gathered from regional and local sources and through interviews with practitioners and businesses. A web tool called Transportation Project Impact Case Studies (T-PICS) that uses the case study input was designed to help decision-makers predict economic impacts of highways more accurately prior to construction. See the draft T-PICS tool here: http://stage.shrp.icfi.com/t-pics/#

Updates about the C11 project will be posted in the TCAPP Forum on a regular basis. For more information about the C03 and C11 projects, contact amahendra@icfi.com.