Information Center for the Environment

This manual reviews the motivations and methods for transportation project impact assessment under the Regional Advance Mitigation Planning (RAMP) framework. RAMP is a process that creates an inventory of expected environmental impacts from multiple transportation (or other development) projects within a region (Thorne et al. 2009; Thorne et al. 2014). When conducted early in the lifecycle of the projects, such as after projects are identified on long-range transportation plans but prior to being programmed, proposed mitigation can be developed earlier, resulting in efficiencies for both project delivery and budget, and effectiveness of the mitigation developed. The RAMP approach can help avoid the cost of delays and over-runs due to late and fragmented project-by-project environmental planning and mitigation, which in California has been estimated by Caltrans internal reports at $59 million per year (Byrne 2005).