Making Scenario Planning Work for Transportation

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What is Scenario Planning?

Transportation agencies make decisions with incomplete information every day. Funding assumptions shift. Weather, growth, and operational conditions change. Yet plans, programs, and investments still need to move forward. Scenario planning provides a practical way to account for these uncertainties. It helps agencies structure the “what if” questions they already consider and use them to choose strategies that perform well across a range of future conditions.

Scenario planning is a structured way to identify key factors that could change, explore multiple plausible future conditions, and test decisions, investments, and strategies across those conditions.

The goal is not to predict the future, but to identify strategies that perform well under a range of future conditions. When applied in a practical way, scenario planning helps agencies:

Make clearer, more defensible decisions
Reduce unexpected outcomes
Clarify tradeoffs for leadership and partners
Improve coordination across departments
Document decisions in a way that supports continuity over time

About the Study

This project seeks to support the effective use of scenario planning by transportation agencies through a targeted and practical implementation approach. In particular, the work will:

Provide tailored, actionable, and transportation-specific scenario planning resources. Resources will be refined for relevance to agency needs and aligned with real-world decision-making contexts.
Establish sustainable and scalable dissemination pathways. For scenario planning to be adopted widely, materials must be accessible to practitioners and supported through networks that evolve with emerging challenges.
Design stakeholder engagement and training methods informed by behavioral science. Adoption of scenario planning is contingent upon clear communication and effective learning. Training will incorporate plain language, visual aids, and facilitation methods grounded in behavioral science to support understanding and retention.
Connect scenario-based strategies to funding mechanisms. A key barrier to implementation is the difficulty of translating identified strategies into funded projects. This effort will embed funding alignment into scenario planning activities so that strategies are not only insightful but also implementable.

Project Objectives

Advance scenario planning as a practical, widely used approach for managing uncertainty in transportation decisions.
Share transferable examples showing how agencies have integrated scenario planning into routine decision-making.
Clarify what agencies need for scenario planning to work in practice.
Develop and test practical approaches and resources that fit existing transportation workflows.

Questions?

We are here to answer your questions. Reach out to:

Sid Mohan
National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP)
SMohan@nas.edu

Jen Pepson Elwood
Dewberry Engineers
jpepsonelwood@dewberry.com

Learn More About the Project

This is an uncorrected draft as submitted by the research team for NCHRP Project 20-44(57): Implementing Scenario Planning Across Transportation Agencies. This material is based upon work supported by the FHWA under Agreement No. 693JJ32350025. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed or implied in this document are those of the researchers who performed the research and are not necessarily those of the Transportation Research Board; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; the FHWA; or the program sponsors.