IMPROVING THE PROCESS OF PROGRAMMING TRANSPORTATION INVESTMENTS.

This paper presents a methodology that integrates regional equity, funding constraints, public acceptance, and uncertainty into a technical programming procedure. Developed for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, it can be used to generate tentative multiple-period investment programs that are reasonably efficient in an economic sense and comply with a variety of funding, legislative, and community constraints. The program generation procedure is a heuristic one, based on marginal analysis. It handles independent and mutually exclusive investments, project benefit interdependencies, multiple funding sources, regional and other expenditure minimums, and functional classification constraints.