The City of Bozeman, Montana  is interested in exploring possible revisions to its approach for traffic modeling.  Current development standards require any new development to complete a traffic impact study (TIS) as part of the development application. A TIS contains a traffic impact analysis (TIA) that predicts how the traffic added by the development will impact the transportation system (note that some people use TIA and TIS terms interchangeably).  In addition, every five to seven years the city of Bozeman updates the Bozeman Area Transportation Plan. Part of this update includes an update of the travel demand forecasting model (TDM) for the city.   This modeling is completed by the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) and includes updating the street network and land uses to predict future traffic volumes. The city of Bozeman would like for this model to be updated more frequently and a system wide approach be developed to evaluate the transportation investments that individual developments helps to make.

The TDM process and the TIS process use similar methods to predict future traffic impacts. In Phase I of this project, WTI developed a white paper summarizing the limitations of the current traffic modeling process and identifying a vision for incorporating and leveraging the modeling efforts with the goal of improving traffic and travel data and analysis to better inform infrastructure and policy decisions.  The white provided a vision for developing an integrated approach, including the development of a centralized system that would contain the data for each TIS and the TDM model data. This project outlines the tasks for implementing this type of system.  In addition to the database and/or model, the system would include procedures, manuals, guidelines, staffing requirements, and other operational components.