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Dallas TSP advisory panel reviews population, employment forecasts that shape future traffic
Summary
Advisory committee reviewed the travel-demand approach and underlying inputs — Portland State University forecasts, Polk County assessor data and U.S. Census figures — and heard that model outputs (used to predict traffic and multimodal stress) remain draft and will be refined after public comment.
A project presenter told the Project Advisory Committee on the Dallas transportation-system-plan update that the future-conditions analysis uses professional population forecasts and parcel-level data to estimate where households and jobs are likely to grow and how that growth will affect travel demand.
The presenter said the team used the Portland State University Population Research Center projections together with Polk County assessor records and U.S. Census data to distribute population and employment across the city, then fed those distributions into a general travel-demand model calibrated with regional inputs from the Oregon Department of Transportation. “We take that population and deployment code, we plug it into a general demand model, and it spits out what it expects volumes on the roadway system to look like,” the presenter said.
Committee members raised predictability concerns for redevelopment sites. Jason, participating on the call, noted that redevelopment is harder to predict than greenfield acreage and that the team should update figures when confirmed applications are available. The presenter agreed and asked members to flag known development applications so staff can incorporate them into the model.
Why it matters: The forecasts provide the base case for identifying future gaps — intersections that will exceed mobility targets, segments where bicycle or pedestrian level-of-traffic-stress will increase, and parts of the network that may require different cross sections or new connections.
Next steps: The team described the future-conditions outputs as draft and said they will refine the model after receiving comments and smoothing some graph outputs; committee members were asked to submit comments by December 3 and the project will present results again at an open house in January and the next advisory meeting in March 2026.
