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The Florida Standard Urban Transportation Model Structure (FSUTMS) has been under development by the Bureau of Multimodal Systems Planning (BMMSP) of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) beginning in  1977. The original concept of the FSUTMS is still valid -all urban studies in Florida should have the same modeling structure. Since the original FSUTMS concept was developed, many changes have taken place in the way urban transportation planning is done in Florida. The Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Planning Package (PLANPAC) programs have been replaced with the Urban Transportation Planning System (UTPS) of the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA). Now with the decentralization of the urban transportation planning functions by FOOT and the advances made over the past few years in Micro/Mini-computer technology, FSUTMS has been adapted to run on the IBM PC (and compatibles) and DEC VAX systems (will the VMS operating system) as Micro/Mini-FSUTMS.

Florida presently then had 21 federally designated urbanized areas ranging in size from Miami, Dade County, with well over one million population, to five newly designated urban areas with populations only slightly over 50,000. Florida is also conducting an urban study in the Key West area, an city of less than 50,000. Because of this diversity in the size and complexity of the transportation studies in Florida, the FSUTMS operates in four separate modes.

The four modes are Non-Transit, Single Path Transit, Multi-Path/Single-Period Transit and Multi-Path/Multi-Period Transit. The Non-Transit mode of FSUTMS was used in the smaller urbanized study areas which either did not then have a public transit system or had small transit systems which could not be effectively modeled. The Single Path Transit mode was used in medium and small urbanized areas which have small transit public transit operations and/or wish to include transit planning in their future plans. The Single Path Transit mode is used where no appreciable difference exists between peak and off-peak transit route and schedule travel times.

Multi-Path/Single-Period Transit analysis is applied to urbanized areas which have larger and more complex transit operations with multiple modes and different peak and off-peak schedule structures. The fourth mode of FSUTMS, Multi-Path, Multi-Period Transit is applied to very largest urbanized areas which require more detailed analysis during the off-peak.