With the passage of the intermodal surface transportation efficiency act, there became a heightened awareness that our understanding of intermodal and multimodal facilities was limited. Private enterprise has been working for many years on applications which would allow for a package to move from point a to point b by the most efficient mode, with the purchaser of the service only being aware of an on-time, quality delivery. The big question in conducting any planning effort for the facility types is how to determine both the magnitude and type of traffic which will be produced and attracted by the land use. An extension of that issue is the relationship among the various components of the intermodal facility and the traffic which comes and goes. Is a person arriving to eat at a restaurant housed within the facility, get on a train, get on a subway, or just to look at the lovely old station? The project proposed will demonstrte both the means of collecting relevant data with handheld computing power and, with some pilot applicaitons, the procedures and processes for collecting and analyzing the data.
