Case Study:

Sacramento, California

Application

Scenarios

This section describes the specific policy scenarios tested. SACMET96 and MEPLAN are both used to compare various combinations of transit expansion, transit-oriented development (TOD), and pricing scenarios in the years 2005 and 2015. (The land use strategies are examined in 2015 only, because of the long timeframe required to implement such policies and to realize their effects.) All the transportation network improvements are made in the year 2005 for the MEPLAN scenarios, and thus land use is affected in the years 2010 and 2015 because of the five-year iteration period. Because of the different model structures, some of the scenarios had to be modeled differently in SACMET96 and MEPLAN. Therefore, not all of the results are directly comparable.

The project also examined combinations of road-based scenarios, including high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, road-oriented development (ROD), and pricing. These scenarios were modeled using SACMET96 only, so that travel and emission impacts were estimated, but not land use impacts.

Table 1 identifies which scenarios were modeled using which model. Table 2 provides a description of the scenario elements and modeling approaches.

Table 1. Scenarios Modeled

*Modeled for 2015 only.

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