The Thomas Jefferson Planning district near Charlottesville, Virginia, established the Eastern Planning Initiative (EPI) and set the following goals that it wanted to address in an integrated manner:

• to develop an interactive land use / transportation computer model (ComPlan);

• to create a 50-year vision and implementation strategy for the area; and

• to develop a handbook and a model for other communities.

EPI’s plan included identifying existing community elements, creating ideal community elements, and launching a demonstration computer model so that stakeholders could envision alternative futures. It wanted to develop land use/transportation scenarios that allowed the public to evaluate alternatives and select the most desirable scenarios.

The project team included an advisory committee, the Planning District Commission, Virginia Department of Transportation, Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, local planners, the University of Virginia School of Architecture and Design Center at the Institute for Sustainable Design, and the Renaissance Team.

The first step was to create a 50-year vision. This included establishing a regional plan, community elements, and an implementation plan. The regional plan considered distribution and density of people and jobs. In an effort to determine where people would live, the project team established a regional framework that integrated environmental features and infrastructure and included several alternative futures and visions. Three questions were identified: What types of communities should be considered? Where are the different communities located? How are these communities connected?

To address these questions, the team considered a variety of community variables (elements). Data that were to define the existing community elements included evaluations of open space, building proximity, building scale, street scale, street character, internal paths, external connectivity, parking, and other types of activity in the area. Urban land use elements included residential, mixed use, university/institution, and parks/recreation. Suburban elements included residential, mixed use, retail, office, institutional, industrial, parks/recreation, and conservation areas. Rural land usage included small town, village, residential, mixed use, industrial, parks/recreation, agricultural/forestal, and conservation areas.

The definition of mixed use varied with development densities. In an urban area, mixed use is typically a densely developed or densely populated area or a community within a metropolitan context containing more than one of the following land uses: residential, retail, office, civic, institutional, or industrial. Suburban mixed use refers to an edge community, suburban neighborhood or community, or suburban power center that contains one or more of the following land uses: residential, retail, office, industrial, or institutional. Rural mixed-use areas are sparsely developed or sparsely populated areas with a community that contains more than one of the fol