With much help and encouragement from Kermit Wies and TRB’s ADB45 committee, I have placed most of the content of the Hawaii Guidelines for project-level traffic forecasting on the TFResource.org website in fully editable format. At this moment there are 50 “topics” pages containing just about all the methodologies from the Hawaii Guidelines. Some longer examples and case studies have not yet been moved over.
As you recall from my two earlier blog posts of similar titles, the Hawaii Guidelines were created as a much more accessible version of NCHRP Report #765, tailored to Hawaii’s needs, and updated with new methods, examples, and case studies.
You can easily access this content by going to TFResource.org and then entering “project-level” in the search box near the top of the main page for the site. Or you can just follow this link: http://tfresource.org/Project-level_traffic_forecasting. It looks something like this…
Anyone registered on the site can edit or add content to the “category”. That is, if you are a modeler or researcher who is using a new method, you can add it to the site without asking anyone’s permission first. Variations of current methods may also be added to existing topics. While the articles are unattributed, there exists a record of who added what content when.
If you have new content but are unsure of how or where to add it to the site, contact Kermit, me, or Julie Dunbar. Ditto if you would like help editing your contribution. It is not simple to create your own topic page containing equations, graphs, or tables.
There is an overall structure to the category, and it would be nice if that structure could be maintained. Basically, there is a table-of-contents page listing all the topics by subcategories, and all the topics link back to this table-of-contents page. Links to similar pages on the site are used throughout.
While we did not attempt to hide Hawaii’s role in creating these guidelines, we did some rewriting of the methods to make them more generic. The Hawaii Guidelines were very assertive as to what should and should not be done within that particular state. We reduced to strong suggestions any statements that seemed like strict mandates.
NCHRP Report #765 is the primary reference for just about all the content in the category. There is still good material in this NCHRP report that was not immediately needed in Hawaii but would be useful in other locales. Everyone is invited to summarize this material into new topics. Keep in mind that we did not seek permission to take writing from NCHRP Report #765, so you would need to keep direct quotes from this report to a minimum and make sure they are properly cited. (The authors of the Hawaii report have granted permission for their material to be posted and modified.)
If you have a gripe about anything left out of NCHRP Report #765, this is your chance to correct that omission.
More than 30 years elapsed between the publications of NCHRP Report #255 and NCHRP Report #765. While there was still useful content in NCHRP Report #255, much of the report was outdated. We don’t want this to happen again. TFResource.org gives us a vehicle for assuring that project-level traffic forecasting methods remain current and readily available.
This is a grand experiment. Can a subject as varied and expansive as project-level traffic forecasting be updated and maintained by a community of volunteers? Hopefully, we can grow this category well beyond what is contained in NCHRP Report #765 and the Hawaii Guidelines.
Kermit and I want your feedback as to what might be needed next.
Alan Horowitz, Whitefish Bay, February 1, 2018