Anjaneyulu, M.V.L.R.
Assistant Professor
mvlr@nitc.ac.in
Prahallada Reddy, O
Post Graduate Student
Nagaraj, B.N.
Professor
bnn@nitc.ac.in
Department of Civil Engineering
National Institute of Technology Calicut
1.0 Introduction
Traffic and transportation problems in medium sized cities of many developing countries have become grave matters of concern to the governments. Along with the growing population concentration, the rapid increase in the heterogeneous motor traffic and provision of limited transport infrastructure facilities have become the prime reasons for these problems. While the problems of larger metropolitan cities are at least taken note of, those of medium sized are not even recorded. A strategic planning of transport systems will alleviate these problems to a greater extent. Transportation planning process consists of analysis of interaction between supply in the form of existing facilities and the demand in the form of traffic load. It also involves forecasting for the future and evaluation of the alternatives arrived at the planning stage.
Information about land use, demographic and economic characteristics, existing travel facilities and travel characteristics is required at various stage of transportation planning process. Transportation planning deals with large amounts of data, which are inherently spatial in nature. The process is data intensive and causes overwhelming resource strain of map and data manipulation. Also the informations will be collected and maintained by a variety of public and private agencies and hence, it is very difficult to get the necessary data in time. Tools that facilitate easy storage, maintenance and retrieval of large volumes of graphic/non-graphic data and that permit simultaneous sharing of data by many users will be highly useful for transportation planning.
