Small City Synthesis of Transportation Planning and Economic Development: User's Guide

There is a need to increase cooperation and communication between small city transportation planning and economic development. This is critical at the local level, important at the regional level, and desirable at the state level. The purpose of this project is to create a traffic-modeling template to act as a guide for small cities in Texas. The pilot city for this study is the city of Alice in Jim Wells County.|Using Alice, Texas, as a model, a template has been developed to increase the cooperation and communciation between transportation planning and economic development groups. The template establishes a foundation for coordinating traffic forecasts with projected urban/economic development plans. Currently, the two sets of information are rarely applied together in small Texas cities. Small cities above 10,000 and under 50,000 in population will benefit most from this research effort. Additionally, the template could be a useful planning tool at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) for corridor analyses.