National Highway Planning Network

National Highway Planning Network
Name	National Highway Planning Network
Country	United States
Maintained by	Federal Highway Administration; Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Established	1990s
Type	digital roadway dataset
Coverage	United States
Format	geospatial network

Contents

National Highway Planning Network The National Highway Planning Network is a geospatial roadway dataset created to support transportation planning and policy analysis across the United States. It aggregates route geometry, functional classification, and attribution to enable modeling for agencies such as the Federal Highway Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, State Departments of Transportation, and metropolitan planning organizations like the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The dataset interfaces with models used by the Congressional Budget Office, Department of Transportation, and research centers such as the Transportation Research Board and National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

Overview

The Network provides a routable representation of the Interstate Highway System, U.S. Highway System, and principal state and local arterials to support analyses by the Federal Highway Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, RAND Corporation, Brookings Institution, Pew Research Center, and other policy and research organizations. It supplies topology, mileposts, and attribution compatible with tools from Esri, OpenStreetMap, U.S. Geological Survey, and software libraries used by National Renewable Energy Laboratory and regional planning bodies such as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Network encodes links and nodes with attribution for route designation, functional class, lane counts, and length, interoperable with standards from Federal Geographic Data Committee and format conventions used by Esri Shapefile and GeoJSON. Attributes include identifiers that link to Highway Performance Monitoring System records, National Bridge Inventory references, and Freight Analysis Framework commodities flows used by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and U.S. Department of Commerce. Geometry aligns with basemaps from the U.S. Geological Survey and coordinate reference systems like North American Datum of 1983. Metadata practices reference guidance from the National Spatial Data Infrastructure and the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Agencies employ the Network for travel demand modeling with software such as TransCAD, EMME, VISUM, and Aimsun, and for scenario analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency and National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Planners in metropolitan planning organizations such as the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and Southeast Michigan Council of Governments use it for congestion analysis, air quality conformity assessments tied to Clean Air Act requirements, and emergency response planning with partners like Federal Emergency Management Agency. Freight analysts at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Department of Homeland Security, and private firms such as UPS and FedEx use the Network within supply chain models and corridor studies like those for the I-95 Corridor Coalition.

The Network links to performance measures in Highway Performance Monitoring System and to demographic inputs from the U.S. Census Bureau and American Community Survey for travel forecasting used by regional planning authorities and federal program offices. It supports investment programming under statutes influenced by the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act and coordination among entities including Metropolitan Planning Organizations, state DOTs, and regional transit agencies like Metra, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York), and Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Scenario planning efforts by the Congressional Budget Office, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and university research centers incorporate the Network for multimodal integration with Amtrak, Federal Railroad Administration, and port authorities.

Standards for the Network draw on the Federal Geographic Data Committee framework, Open Geospatial Consortium services, and federal reporting systems such as the Highway Performance Monitoring System and National Bridge Inventory. Maintenance is coordinated among the Federal Highway Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and state DOTs through data submission cycles and quality assurance using tools from Esri, Trimble, and open-source projects informed by OpenStreetMap communities and academic labs at University of California, Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Limitations include temporal lag in state submissions, resolution gaps compared to real-time sources like HERE Technologies and TomTom, and incompatibilities with some local roadway datasets maintained by municipalities such as the City of Los Angeles and New York City Department of Transportation. Future development trajectories cited by the Federal Highway Administration and Bureau of Transportation Statistics emphasize integration with real-time traffic feeds, enhanced freight attribution for the Freight Analysis Framework, improved multimodal links with Federal Railroad Administration and Federal Transit Administration datasets, and adoption of standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium and National Spatial Data Infrastructure to support autonomous vehicle corridor planning and climate resilience studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Category:United States transportation