Abstract
Regional studies examining transportation-related emissions and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) highlight the disproportionate safety and environmental impacts of passthrough traffic on vulnerable communities – traffic that travels through, but does not originate or end in these communities. Transportation practitioners and researchers have sought to address these inequities with locally tailored, context sensitive traffic management strategies (e.g., lowered speed limits on residential streets). However, decision makers must carefully consider the network-wide tradeoffs these strategies may introduce, which can complicate their effectiveness. This policy brief presents a network analysis method that is accessible to local and regional transportation agencies using Mobiliti, a high-performance traffic simulator currently available for research purposes. However, we demonstrate Mobiliti’s practical applications for transportation agencies. Developed by research scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Mobiliti offers traffic assignment solutions and regional simulation capabilities, allowing for high-resolution, iterative exploration of road treatments and routing strategies. Analysts can manipulate network characteristics and vehicle behavior by adjusting parameters such as lane count, speed limit, and the percentage of vehicles, to dynamically optimize travel times. These capabilities can support transportation equity evaluations by giving network managers deeper insights into the mutual relationships between local and regional traffic dynamics and the resulting social impacts.
