The City of Bozeman, Montana is interested in revising the current approach for traffic modeling and the model’s implications to transportation system investment decisions.  The 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.

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 (TDFM) 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.

These two processes (TDFM and TIA) use similar methods to predict future traffic impacts.  The purpose of this project is to develop a process for an annually updated TDFM for the Bozeman area, and integration of the TDFM with TIS/TIA traffic distribution.