TRANSPORTAION PLANNING AND ITS TRADITIONAL

PROCESS

Transportation planning focuses on financing of transportation assets and

upon the public provision, particularly public transit and road systems. It is
usually addresses specific broad transport concerns or problems at local level.
It has been traditionally a preoccupation of lower tier governments, such as
the municipality or state. Transport planning is most developed in urban
sphere and it is there where most experience has been gathered because of
this fact.

The planning process has a number of similarities with the policy process.
There are essential steps in planning and these are identifying problems,
seeking options and implementing the chosen strategy. Because it tends to
deal with localized problems, the solutions adopted in transport planning tend
to be much more exact and specific than policy directives.

The common perspective is that planning is the realm of the public sector,
although the private sector owns and operate substantial transportation
assets. For a long time been planning was a field dominated by traffic
engineers who gave it a distinctly mechanistic character, in which the planning
process was seen as a series of rigorous steps undertaken to measure likely
impacts and to propose engineering solutions. There were four major steps:
Trip generation, trip distribution, modal split, and route selection. They
involved the use of mathematical models, including regression analysis,
entropy-maximizing models, and critical path analysis.