Land Use/Transportation Evaluation for the Forest Drive Corridor

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The 3.5-mile Forest Drive corridor is a County arterial road within the City of Annapolis and extending into Anne Arundel County at either side of the municipal boundary (see Figures 1 and 2). While the County is responsible for the road – its potential expansion and maintenance – the City is responsible for land uses in the corridor, thus setting up potential conflicts over policies, costs and responsibilities. Because this corridor has been subject to development and redevelopment activities and pressures for some time, recently large residential planned unit developments (PUDs), the City is interested in its capacity. Standard traffic studies have been commissioned to address congestion mitigation and identify engineering and other options. These include a 2015 Traffic Concepts study and 2016 County Major Intersections/Important Facilities (MIIF) study. The abutting land uses have been assumed to be relatively stable and predictable in these studies. This is not a reasonable assumption, however, given the continued development pressures. How much of what kind of development might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? This is an unanswered and important question. This project sought to answer this question by creating a transportation/land use analysis tool that is applied to parcels in this corridor but is also, in principle, applicable to other corridors. Because this is a joint City/County project, it is viewed as an opportunity to bring these jurisdictions together over a difficult topic. The work in this project used the GIS land use database developed for the City by PALS during the summer of 2016 and applied the sketch software tool CommunityViz to the GIS databases to produce a tool that can generate various land use/transportation alternatives and their transportation impacts.

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