About the Technical Forecast Committee
The Technical Forecast Committee includes planners from local governments and other organizations in the Greater Kansas City area. Committee members work together to create long-range, land-use forecasts for the region. <Participant List>
Why make long-range forecasts?
As the region's designated Metropolitan Planning Organization, MARC must predict growth and traffic patterns each time it updates the Long-Range Transportation Plan — a plan that guides all of our transportation investments that use federal funds. Major highways are planned years in advance, and to plan correctly we need to know how and where our population will grow.
Long-range planning requires much more than just predictions of population growth and decline. To plan for efficient transportation systems, we must also predict how land will be used. Where will our employment centers be, our retail development, our green spaces, our hospitals and schools? Will our growth rate follow current trends? Or will changing forces such as climate change, globalization of the economy, technological change and demographic shifts cause us to grow faster than expected — or slower?
Forecasting with Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Using a GIS-based tool called "Paint the Town," planners can "paint" area maps with future land-use patterns and predict the numbers of people and jobs consistent with those patterns.
Cities and counties develop their own long-range plans, and the Technical Forecast Committee works with these local governments to aggregate local plans into a regional forecast using Paint the Town.
Committee Structure
The Technical Forecast Committee oversees three subcommittees, in which all interested TFC members are invited to participate:
- The Regional Subcommittee develops assumptions used to create regional forecasts based on three different scenarios:
- Growth continues according to current trends.
- The region adapts well to the changing forces outlined above, and growth trends higher.
- The region does not adapt well to changing forces, with declining trends.
- The Paint Chip Subcommittee defines the categories, or "paint chips," used in Paint the Town to adequately describe redevelopment and mixed-use development in more adaptive land-use scenarios.
- The Land-Use Subcommittee develops future land-use scenarios based on assumptions about land use and transportation choices.