Knowing the future would be a useful skill for anyone, not least transportation planners. Although we’re not quite there yet, Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning professor Liming Wang has been working on a project that can help planners get close. This project is called VisionEval.
VisionEval is a twenty-year project created and supported by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). The goal of the project was to create a strategic planning tool that DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) could use to rapidly assess what strategies would best help them achieve their planning goals.
The tools contained in the VisionEval family are used to analyze data. Planners can use them to anticipate the effects of transportation supply, prices, and land use on household travel, traffic congestion, public health, and a host of other performance measures of transportation systems. This information can provide a comprehensive assessment on how certain transportation projects, technologies, and policies will affect a region.
VisionEval is free and open-source, facilitating the cross-pollination of a diverse community made up of public agencies and private sector consulting firms, as well as researchers like Dr. Wang. Throughout the US, more than a dozen state and local agencies are applying VisionEval in their policy- and plan-making processes. For example, ODOT relied on VisionEval in the development of the latest Oregon Transportation Plan—the statewide long-range transportation plan. A VisionEval model was used to conduct an exploratory scenario planning process that informed the intricate relationships between transportation funding, investments, travel outcomes, and statewide planning goals.
From 2015–2016, Dr. Wang and his team at Portland State University created the VisionEval multimodal travel demand model, enhancing the model’s capacity to account for transit and active transportation modes. Since 2022, they have been working on improving the land use module of VisionEval, enabling the assessment of land use scenarios and utilizing machine learning to increase prediction accuracy. This project will continue until May 2025.
In 2021, VisionEval was recognized by the Zephyr Foundation, a nonprofit organization that strives to advance the field of travel analysis with improved tools, with the Exceptional Technical Achievement Award. This distinction recognizes projects that have made a “positive impact on the transportation and/or land use decision-making field.”
We may not ever be able to infallibly know the future, but the group of researchers contributing to VisionEval, including Liming Wang, is making predicting the future accessible to all its users. By using VisionEval, urban planners and policymakers can make informed decisions that will benefit their communities for years to come.