Transportation planning in the context of "GO Transit"

In economics, induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demand – is the phenomenon whereby an increase in supply results in a decline in price and an increase in consumption. In other words, as a good or service becomes more readily available and mass produced, its price goes down and consumers are more likely to buy it, meaning that the quantity demanded subsequently increases. This is consistent with the economic model of supply and demand.

In transportation planning, induced demand, also called "induced traffic" or consumption of road capacity, has become important in the debate over the expansion of transportation systems, and is often used as an argument against increasing roadway traffic capacity as a cure for congestion. Induced traffic may be a contributing factor to urban sprawl. City planner Jeff Speck has called induced demand "the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that every thoughtful person seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."

NIMBY (/ˈnɪmbi/; or, nimby), an acronym for the phrase "Not In My Back yard", is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed real estate development and infrastructure developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called nimbys, and their viewpoint is called nimbyism. The opposite movement is known as YIMBY for "yes in my back yard".

Some examples of projects that have been opposed by nimbys include housing development (especially for affordable housing or trailer parks), high-speed rail lines, homeless shelters, day cares, schools, universities and colleges, music venues, bike lanes and transportation planning that promotes pedestrian safety infrastructure, solar farms, wind farms, incinerators, sewage treatment systems, fracking, and nuclear waste repositories.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA /wəˈmɑːtə/ wə-MAH-tə), commonly referred to as Metro, is a tri-jurisdictional public transit agency that operates transit services in the Washington metropolitan area. WMATA provides a rapid transit service under the Metrorail brand, fixed-route bus service under the Metrobus brand, and paratransit service under the MetroAccess brand. In 2024, the system had a ridership of 283,145,700, or about 824,500 per weekday as of the third quarter of 2025.

The agency participates in a regional transportation planning and the execution of transit infrastructure projects. Recent projects include an infill station serving Potomac Yard and an extension of Metrorail to Dulles International Airport.

The spoke–hub distribution paradigm (also known as the hub-and-spoke system) is a form of transport topology optimization in which traffic planners organize routes as a series of "spokes" that connect outlying points to a central "hub". Simple forms of this distribution/connection model contrast with point-to-point transit systems, in which each point has a direct route to every other point, and which modeled the principal method of transporting passengers and freight until the 1970s. Delta Air Lines pioneered the spoke–hub distribution model in 1955. In the late 1970s the telecommunications and information technology sector subsequently adopted this distribution topology, dubbing it the star network network topology.

"Hubbing" involves "the arrangement of a transportation network as a hub-and-spoke model".

In transport planning, accessibility refers to a measure of the ease of reaching (and interacting with) destinations or activities distributed in space, e.g. around a city or country. Accessibility is generally associated with a place (or places) of origin. A place with "high accessibility" is one from which many destinations can be reached or destinations can be reached with relative ease. "Low accessibility" implies that relatively few destinations can be reached for a given amount of time/effort/cost or that reaching destinations is more difficult or costly from that place.

The concept can also be defined in the other direction, and we can speak of a place having accessibility from some set of surrounding places. For example, one could measure the accessibility of a store to customers as well as the accessibility of a potential customer to some set of stores.

A road diet (also called a lane reduction, road rechannelization or road conversion) is a technique in transportation planning whereby the number and/or the width of travel lanes of the road is reduced, often to achieve a reduction in crash rates.

Annual average daily traffic (AADT) is a measure used primarily in transportation planning, transportation engineering and retail location selection. Traditionally, it is the total volume of vehicle traffic of a highway or road for a year divided by 365 days. AADT is a simple, but useful, measurement of how busy the road is.

AADT is the standard measurement for vehicle traffic load on a section of road, and the basis for some decisions regarding transport planning, or the environmental hazards of pollution related to road transport.

An isochrone map in geography and urban planning is a map that depicts the area accessible from a point within a certain time threshold. An isochrone (iso = equal, chrone = time) is defined as "a line drawn on a map connecting points at which something occurs or arrives at the same time". In hydrology and transportation planning isochrone maps are commonly used to depict areas of equal travel time. The term is also used in cardiology as a tool to visually detect abnormalities using body surface distribution.