Predicting Changes In Urban Form From Transportation System Changes A Proposed Methodology

The plan of the document is as follows: Section II discusses two dimensions of urban form. Specific policy questions are identified and a brief sketch of how this research will provide predictive tools to deal more effectively with these questions is presented. Section III describes in more detail the approach used to relate changes in transportation system characteristics to changes in urban form. Section IV presents several potential applications of the approach. The Appendix describes some of the available data sources.

Includes publications previously listed in the supplements to the Index of selected publications of the Rand Corporation (Oct. 1962-Feb. 1963).

The problem of providing privacy transformations for data banks and retrieval systems falls into two modern disciplines: information theory and computer science. In the paper the concern is primarily with the former. Here it is shown that measures of privacy can be drawn from information theory and, in particular, from rate distortion theory. It is demonstrated that a rate distortion function or the minimum mutual information about a record, conveyed by a distorted version of the record, is a natural measure of privacy. Shannon's conditions for perfect secrecy are met if the average mutual information about an original record R, given a distorted version E, is zero. (Author).

One way of planning for a region's future transportation infrastructure and capacity needs is to forecast travel demand. Integrated land use-transportation modeling tools do this in a way that is sensitive to how the performance of a transportation system affects peoples' decisions of where to live and firms' decisions of where to locate. As such, they are helpful tools for analyzing different transportation and land use policy scenarios. The transportation system is a factor in how new urban areas develop. Policies attempt to regulate dispersed urban development, known as urban sprawl, however integrated modeling frameworks can only evaluate those policies that affect the extent of non-urban land legislated as developable, or those within urban areas. Incorporating other policies relating to sprawl into integrated models is limited by their ability to represent geometric changes to the landscape; those associated with the transition of non-urban land to residential use. Building on current methods for representing geometric landscape changes, this thesis is about models and algorithms for representing the specific forms these changes can take. There are a number of algorithms, taking distinct approaches to subdividing blocks into parcels and generating roads, suggesting different algorithms are better for generating different forms. There is little guidance on when to use which algorithm, potentially resulting in sub-optimal geometric representation of future urban areas. This thesis outlines a process for representing the spatial distribution of urban form in future urban areas within integrated models. To this end, it has estimated a model for predicting the spatial distribution of road network patterns in future residential neighborhoods and identified the block subdivision algorithm most suited to subdividing each of the possible road network patterns. Results can serve as guidelines for deciding which algorithms to use on which road network types. They also present a possible way of estimating the type of future road network in a local area as a function of slope of terrain, period of development, proximity to a river and adjacency to a road network of the same type, among others. This knowledge could help improve the accuracy of population predictions and potentially be implemented within the modeling process of integrated models once these are better able to represent geometric changes to the landscape.