Many metropolitan planning organizations are moving from traditional fixed-point planning to scenario planning for their federally mandated long-range transportation plans. But the scenarios these organizations use to build and evaluate potential plans need to be built on actual data and trends if they are going to produce good transportation plans.
For example, Plan Bay Area 2050, the official regional long-range plan finalized by San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments in Oct. 2021, used a scenario-based process they called Futures Planning to examine “which strategies that could be advanced by local jurisdictions, regional agencies, or the
