St. Louis Metropolitan Area

Since 2005, East-West Gateway Council of Governments has been using LEAM to conduct its planning analyses of the eight-county St. Louis metropolitan region. A sampling of the planning projects include: ongoing generation of projections for the Long-Range Transportation Plan, quantifying stress to the region's natural assets, and determining the need for a new interstate bridge crossing the Mississippi River. A concurrent redevelopment model has also been built specifically for St. Louis City. LEAM has become fully integrated with East-West Gateway's travel demand model. A custom Planning Portal allows users to access the connected models from any computer via the Internet.

Champaign County, Illinois

LEAM is being used to model land use change and growth in Champaign County as part of the miPlan project. miPLAN or Mobility Implementation Plan, is steered by a multi-agency consortium, including members from the cities of Champaign and Urbana, Champaign County, the Village of Savoy, the University of Illinois, the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, and more, who seek to enhance mobility now and in the future around the growing Champaign-Urbana region. One of the major goals of the miPlan project is to enhance mobility around the region via many different modes of transportation.

Strategic Sustainability Assessment (Fort Bragg, North Carolina)

The Army Strategy for the Environment's Strategic Sustainability Assessment study of the Fall Line region of the southeastern United States focused on the Fort Bragg region as a pilot project. Recurring issues of concern include: air quality, water quantity and quality, threatened and endangered species, renewable and non-renewable energy availability, housing availability and affordability, education, and the ability to conduct testing and training operations.

LEAM was used to model future development in the region and uncover its potential impacts to the environment, surrounding cities, and the military's operations.

SouthCentral Illinois

The South Central Illinois Regional Planning and Development Commission has utilized LEAM services since 2006. The rural character and dispersed settlement pattern of this five-county region presented the Commission with the challenge of communicating and coordinating the planning activities and questions of their stakeholders.

LEAMgroup created a regional model for scenario planning, and tested the potential impacts of important regional issues, from agricultural land protection policies to future biofuel and coal facilities to highway improvements. A secure, login-only online framework to communicate report results and gather feedback was created to facilitate discussions at monthly board meetings and ensure members were on the same page.

Stakeholders now have a central repository of regional information and a system on which to build, making updating simpler and eliminating the need to "start from scratch" on each planning project.

Grand Traverse Region, Michigan

The TALUS-LEAM project, in conjunction with TC-TALUS, involved modeling and analysis of future land use and transportation infrastructure in the Traverse City, Michigan, region. The project was specifically meant to: meet the requirements of the Transportation, Community, and System Preservation pilot program for the region; promote regional dialog on land use and planning activities; and create partnerships among governmental and non-governmental entities.

An application of the land use model using widely-available national data was used to simulate "Business-as-Usual" and "High Growth" scenarios in order to spur public discussion. The outcome comparison of these and other scenarios began the local process of identifying important regional drivers of change and different patterns of potential growth.

By the end of the process, stakeholders came to the realization that a set of different futures is likely to contain within it conditions that may actually unfold in the future, and the study of such a set is much more valuable than considering and analyzing a single possible future.