The Smart Growth Area Planning (SmartGAP) tool was developed as part of the of the SHRP 2 C16 project, “The Effect of Smart Growth Policies on Travel Demand” to provide transportation planning agencies with improved tools and methods for more accurately and comprehensively integrating transportation investment decision-making with land development and growth management (smart growth strategies). The project synthesized existing research and packaged it into an easy to use software tool, SmartGAP, intended for use by transportation and land use planners.

By combining multiple research sources, SmartGAP is a comprehensive tool that bridges the gap between regional agencies visioning processes and their transportation plans, which evaluate projects: SmartGAP evaluates scenarios at a regional level with available data sources to identify the most promising policies that could be further tested using a more detailed project-level tool. SmartGAP can evaluate regional significant changes in the built environment, travel demand, transportation supply, and policies such as regional road pricing, ITS strategies and travel demand management policies. SmartGAP is designed to evaluate regions, which can be a multi-county metropolitan region. It distinguishes between population and employment living/working in the urban core, close in communities, suburban and rural/greenfield areas based on densities, diversity in land uses, street design or intersection densities, job accessibility by auto, distances to transit stops, and connectivity of the street system. SmartGAP is implemented in R, an open source statistical programming platform, and has a graphical user interface to allow for non-technical users to be able to use the tool for planning activities more easily.

SmartGAP was piloted with Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), and the Thurston Regional Planning Commission (TRPC) in Olympia Washington, and in addition the project team tested an application in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. We present an introduction to the SmartGAP model and software and focus on the results of pilot tests, including the usability of the software, the results produced during scenario testing carried out by the pilot test agencies, and benchmarking of the results against observed data.