Sustainable Ways to Integrate Future Transportation, or SWIFT Houston, examines future scenarios for Houston's development in a comprehensive manner that thoughtfully considers transportation’s role in sustainable development patterns and the role of emerging transportation technologies, such as automated vehicles and Mobility as a Service (MaaS). SWIFT is a framework for performance-based comprehensive scenario planning that evaluates strategic interventions in several sectors, such as transportation, land use, housing, and economic development, and identifies the most robust high-impact actions, eventually coalescing them into a strategic plan with policy initiatives and capital projects that help Houston grow into a future that is sustainable yet flexible enough to absorb rapid changes in transportation technology.
The SWIFT approach is not about moving people, but about connecting people. This does not necessarily rely on new transport facilities but on the synergies between transportation, land use, urban design, environmental and economic policy.
SWIFT Houston will help inform policy makers, planners, and engineers on the expected trends and impacts of emerging transportation technologies such as automated vehicles, transportation network companies and MaaS. Those impacts will be evaluated in the context of shifting land use patterns, development typologies and densities, and multimodal connectivity, and the resulting outputs of those impacts will be measured across multiple sectors such as equity, economics, social, mobility, infrastructure and environmental considerations.
Client
Texas Department of Transportation, Houston District
Services
- Transportation planning
- Traffic modeling
- Land use planning
- Data analytics
