Facilitating Smart Growth with Context-Sensitive Transportation Review of Site Development

Abstract

In 2016, Montgomery County, Maryland revamped the approach with which the planning department reviews transportation impacts of site development. The development of the 2017 Local Area Transportation Review Guidelines included a comprehensive and collaborative review of alternative approaches to growth management and resulted in the development of more robust and multimodal analytic approaches, a set of context-sensitive and multimodal trip generation rates, and a commitment to continue the development of pro-rata share districts in lieu of traditional traffic impact studies. The 2017 guidelines were developed with the benefit of a review of contemporary best practices nationwide and a 30-person working group representing various transportation impact review stakeholder interests that convened 21 times over the course of 3 years. The new approach was developed to balance three potentially competing objectives: streamline the process in smart growth areas of the county, increase the degree of multimodalism, and increase the degree of robustness in the analytic approach and data. The key additions to the process included establishing policy area groupings based on transportation demand characteristics; developing a set of context-sensitive, multimodal trip generation rates; and introducing quantitative tests for non-auto impacts. This paper highlights both the process and outcomes of the updated approach.