Planning Techniques to Estimate Speeds and Service Volumes for Planning Applications

This report recommends methods for transportation planners to estimate speeds and service volumes.  Methods are presented for long-range transportation planning and other planning applications such as traffic impact analyses and major investment studies.  For this research, planning agencies were surveyed to determine their needs and capabilities, existing methods of estimating speeds and service volumes were reviewed, and improved methods were developed.  Recommendations are presented for long-range transportation planning and sketch planning (for which very little data are available and computational efficiency is very important) and for other types of planning studies.