Countywide Land Use Forecasts

Abstract

This report presents the procedure used for developing land-use forecasts for the Cumberland County, New Jersey Urban Area Transportation Study. The procedure allocates population and employment to traffic zones based on: (1) Total study area forecasts; (2) a random number generator to simulate the introduction of new employers or housing into the study area; and (3) location criteria applied to small areal units. The departure embodied in this work is principally the scale of effort required to accomplish the task. The Cumberland Study staff did not have the resources required by the elaborate models used in large cities. The procedure presented herein made some of the concepts of these models available for the Cumberland Study by emphasizing manual rather than machine techniques. The resulting land use forecast was considerably more sophisticated than the seat-of-the-pants approach which might otherwise have been used.