in nyc it's quite common (maybe even required) to run simulations of changes of infrastructure before making them to see how they will effect traffic.
source: my partner helps run these simulations as part of their job/their company gets contract work from the city all the time to check changes of bus routes/etc.
I've had some trouble getting in touch with the engineers who did this around Seattle. Any details they can share about the software they use, what metrics they base decisions on, where they pull demand data? Any thoughts on making the input and results of these simulations public so anybody can reproduce the analysis, experiment on their own, etc?
source: my partner helps run these simulations as part of their job/their company gets contract work from the city all the time to check changes of bus routes/etc.