Project Summary
This project investigates how statewide transportation planning goals and objectives have been incorporated into local plans, with a focus on six cities in Orange County, California that have recently updated their general plans. Using both conventional plan content analysis methods and newly emerging (sentence transformer-based) semantic text similarity analysis techniques, the project identifies complex patterns of local plan updates in relation to a variety of state goals/objectives and thereby reveals which goals/objectives are less likely to be incorporated by localities. By analyzing various types of information (e.g., visions, goals, policies, implementation details, and fact bases) embedded in both old and new plans, along with additional sources of information including public comments, the investigation is performed in a way that provides insights into what makes it challenging for some localities to embrace certain state goals or objectives, and how these challenges might be mitigated. Through a comparison of plan update patterns across cities, the project offers lessons on what types of state-local conflicts arise and where.