Mountain West MPO: LRTP scenario comparison
MPO · 4-county regionContext
A metropolitan planning organization serving a four-county mountain region needed to update its Long Range Transportation Plan with credible demand evidence spanning multiple transit operators, DOT count stations, and a regional bike-share system. Previous LRTP cycles had relied on manual data collection and a regional travel demand model with a three-year update lag.
The Challenge
Cross-boundary travel patterns were invisible in individual agency data. The MPO needed a unified demand surface that could simultaneously reflect transit ridership, vehicle flows, and active transportation demand across all four counties — and support scenario comparison for four alternative 20-year investment strategies.
The Approach
Mobvynt merged GTFS feeds from three transit operators, DOT count station data, and bike-share GBFS across the planning boundary. The unified H3 demand surface provided baseline and projected demand indices for each scenario. CMAQ project documentation used modal shift projections derived from the demand surface rather than standalone before-after studies.
Results
- Multi-jurisdiction demand surface spanning three transit agencies and one DOT system built in 10 weeks
- Four LRTP investment scenarios compared against baseline demand indices in a single environment
- CMAQ application for a BRT corridor approved on first submission
- Regional System Performance Report inputs generated directly from platform metrics
We'd been trying to make the case for a new BRT corridor for three years. The H3 analysis finally gave us the corridor demand data at the spatial resolution the LRTP required. The CMAQ application was approved on the first submission.