Case Study: Southern California Association of Governments achieves sustainable regional planning with UrbanFootprint

Southern California Association of Governments - Customer Case Study

Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the nation’s largest metropolitan planning organization, needed a way to develop and evaluate long-range regional planning scenarios that could balance land use, transportation investment, housing, and climate goals across a vast six-county region. UrbanFootprint, through the Calthorpe Analytics team, supported SCAG with scenario development and modeling services for regional planning efforts including the Southern California Compass Blueprint and the region’s first Sustainable Communities Strategy.

UrbanFootprint helped SCAG create and compare multiple land use and transportation scenarios, integrating existing plans and prior planning work to test different distributions of homes, jobs, housing mix, and transportation investment levels. The results helped SCAG engage stakeholders and the public, and showed the benefits of more compact, walkable, transit-oriented growth, including reduced greenfield land consumption, lower infrastructure costs, and savings in fuel, energy, water use, household costs, and public health impacts.

Southern California Association of Governments