Flutterby™! : Induced Travel Calculator

Today in "duh" news: Interview: California Freeway Expansion Projects Induce Travel, and Underestimate Impacts of Additional Driving — UC Davis scholars Susan Handy, Jamey Volker, and Amy Lee created a online Induced Travel Calculator tool to project how road expansion projects would increase driving

The authors created a publicly-accessible online tool, an Induced Travel Calculator, to estimate how much driving a highway expansion project in California will induce. Anyone can input the number of planned new roadway lane miles and the calculator will estimate the new driving anticipated to result. For example, in the L.A. region, each new lane-mile can be anticipated to induce an additional 8.6 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per year. City Observatory recently calibrated the calculator for a freeway expansion proposed in Portland, Oregon. City Observatory notes that greenhouse gas emissions relate directly to VMT (generally, 1,000 miles driven produces ~0.466 tons of greenhouse gases), so the calculator can be used to estimate climate change impacts of roadway expansions.

Last year they published Induced Vehicle Travel in the Environmental Review Process,