DOT Owes Cities a Travel Demand Study. It Was Due in 2023. It Is Not Done.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in 2021, directed the Department of Transportation to conduct a travel demand data and forecasting study by November 2023 — and to repeat it at least once every five years thereafter. The study was supposed to produce best practices and guidance for states and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to use when forecasting travel demand for future transportation investments. As of the GAO’s March 2026 review, the study has not been completed. No plan for completing it exists.
DOT cited resource constraints and the complexity of the task. FHWA, which GAO identified as responsible for the requirement, has taken partial steps: it identified a National Cooperative Highway Research Program study on traffic forecasting accuracy as a starting point, contracted with four private firms to support best practices development, and scheduled listening sessions with MPOs between December 2025 and March 2026. One contract will explore using artificial intelligence to improve travel demand models. These are substantive activities. They are also uncoordinated into a plan with defined steps and timelines.
That gap matters because the MPOs waiting for this guidance are not managing well in its absence. GAO’s survey of all 410 MPOs — with an 86 percent response rate — found that about one-third do not know how to incorporate telework information into transportation planning and either do not intend to try or lack the tools and expertise to do so. More than 90 percent expressed a desire for additional resources, tools, and guidance from DOT specifically on this question. Twenty-five percent reported that accurately forecasting vehicle use and transit trends had become harder in 2024 than in 2019.
The difficulty is not abstract. An MPO representative told GAO that telework schedules in their region vary by day of the week: Monday and Friday see high remote rates, Tuesday through Thursday see peak office attendance. This means traffic bottlenecks shift location and timing across the week. Determining where and when to prioritize capacity enhancements becomes genuinely difficult without updated analytical frameworks. The old commute-centric travel demand models were not designed for this.
DOT’s existing support mechanisms have not filled the gap. The Transportation Planning Capacity Building Peer Program offers workshops and roundtables, but recent sessions covered grant management and stakeholder engagement — not telework-adjusted forecasting. The Travel Model Improvement Program publishes modeling research and maintains a voluntary email list. FHWA officials told GAO they had not received any requests from MPOs about incorporating telework into forecasts. That silence likely reflects the absence of a standard methodology to ask about, not the absence of the underlying need.
GAO’s recommendation is targeted: the FHWA Administrator should establish and implement a detailed plan with clear steps and timelines to complete the required study and produce the resulting guidance. DOT concurred. It committed to providing a detailed response within 180 days of the report’s March 2026 issuance — which sets an informal deadline around September 2026.
The consequence of continued delay is not abstract either. Transportation plans are used to prioritize which infrastructure projects receive federal funding. If those plans are built on pre-pandemic travel assumptions, the projects they prioritize will reflect a demand pattern that no longer exists. The fiscal pressure on major transit systems — facing structural revenue shortfalls as COVID relief funds run out — makes accurate forecasting more urgent, not less. Misallocated capital in a constrained funding environment has a long service life.