Abstract

This paper presents a general procedure for determining the potential national market and total socioeconomic and environmental impacts for an urban transportation system concept that can be considered for implementation in a large number of urban areas. The procedure involves the following closely interrelated steps: (a) statistical classification of all metropolitan areas into relatively homogeneous groups on the basis of their transportation requirements; (b) selection of the most representative area in each group; (c) performance of analytical case studies in each representative area in order to synthesize the optimal system design for that area and evaluate the impacts on user and nonuser population stratifications; (d) statistical analyses of the differences among areas within the same group; (e) performance of sensitivity analyses of each case study guided by these difference analyses; (f) extensions of the results of the case studies to the other areas in each group through the use of the sensitivity and difference analyses; and (g) aggregation of the market estimates for all metropolitan areas and of the total impacts for the country as a whole by user and nonuser population stratifications. Specific methods are given for many of the steps in the procedure, and guidelines are presented for some of the more traditional planning tasks such as case study analyses