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Certification 📜 Professional Transportation Planner (PTP) insights?

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Jane Jacobs

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There's very little qualitative information about ITE's PTP (Professional Transportation Planner) exam available. This is a contrast from AICP, which has innumerable guides, resources, and collaborative forums/threads. I'm scheduled to take the PTP exam in about three months, and would be greatly appreciative if anyone could share any information along the below lines:

-Exam difficulty? As difficult as AICP?

-Locations of free reference materials? Some PDFs are available online at no cost, and others appear to be scarce. I have reviewed the recommended Reference Material on TPCB's PTP webpage: www.tpcb.org/certification/ptp/reference-material/, and I do not have the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours needed to review all the recommended Reference Materials.

-Particularly relevant reference materials to study for the exam (paid or free)?

-Areas/disciplines of emphasis within the exam?

-Recommended length of time studying before exam? For example, AICP recommended between 80-100 hours.

-Any miscellaneous thoughts/recommendations?

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks in advance for helping clear a murky area.
 
Hello, I know this is a little old but wanted to provide my input.

I took the PTP exam in June 2022 and passed. I have also been an AICP member since 2009 and have worked in the field of transportation planning for 17 years now, and the reason why I decided to take the PTP exam last year.

In my opinion, the PTP exam was not as hard as the AICP exam. When I took the AICP exam it seemed to focus mostly on local government planning/zoning/development and situational issues. But that was 13+ years ago so maybe the questions have changed some. The PTP exam I took seemed to focus on regulations, the transportation/land use relationship, some data/assessment questions, and a few sample situations (most I can't even remember). I paid the $50 and took the practice exam twice and I believe that helped.

Most of the reference materials I had seen or read through at some period, but I mainly read the most recent (I believe 4th Edition) of the Transportation Planning Handbook and the PTP Suite Student Supplement. The handbook is from 2016 but the PTP Suite is from 2008 or 2009, something like that. But both seemed to help with the majority of questions. If you do an internet search you can probably still find them online for free. It took me about 2 months to read through both sources and include notetaking, highlighting, etc.

That is about it. Definitely having experience in the field of planning and/or especially transportation planning would be a plus. If you focus on those two main sources and glance over the other materials you should be fine.
 
Jane Jacobs said:
There's very little qualitative information about ITE's PTP (Professional Transportation Planner) exam available. This is a contrast from AICP, which has innumerable guides, resources, and collaborative forums/threads. I'm scheduled to take the PTP exam in about three months, and would be greatly appreciative if anyone could share any information along the below lines:

-Exam difficulty? As difficult as AICP?

-Locations of free reference materials? Some PDFs are available online at no cost, and others appear to be scarce. I have reviewed the recommended Reference Material on TPCB's PTP webpage: www.tpcb.org/certification/ptp/reference-material/, and I do not have the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours needed to review all the recommended Reference Materials.

-Particularly relevant reference materials to study for the exam (paid or free)?

-Areas/disciplines of emphasis within the exam?

-Recommended length of time studying before exam? For example, AICP recommended between 80-100 hours.

-Any miscellaneous thoughts/recommendations?

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks in advance for helping clear a murky area.
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I took the PTP in 2021 and passed. Like you, I could not find anything. I borrowed a couple of books from engineers I worked with, but a good bit of it was over my head. I finally just started reading everything I could.

I wouldn't bother with the Engineering level books. You are not going to be asked questions about design or the right mix of sand in concrete or whatever. I skimmed through Transportation Engineering & Planning.

The Transportation Planning Handbook was probably the best resource. At one point I found a PDF copy for fairly cheap. If you are not overly familiar with Transit, I would read through all the TCRP referenced material. They're going to ask questions about dwell time, fair recovery ratios, headways, frequency, etc. Transportation Impact Analysis for Site Development was a good read. I do recall a couple of questions that had a sample site layout with turn count estimates and LOS. This is a very practical manual that would benefit you. Context Sensitive Solutions in Designing Major Urban Thoroughfares for Walkable Communities had a lot of related questions, it's basically scaling thoroughfares to the community. You'll get some questions about Trip Generation, but it's basic multiplication of trips X square footage. You do not need memorize traffic counts by use or anything. I would be familiar with travel demand modeling, but the Urban Travel Demand Modeling textbook gets really far into the econometric modeling. Learn Origins and Destinations, trip distribution, etc. There were a couple of O-D matrixes and questions. The Geography of Urban Transportation doesn't really have any new content outside of the aforementioned Handbook. If you can find it for cheap it might be worth reinforcing what you've already read if you want. I did not read through the Parking Generation text and I should have. There are several parking related questions.

Personally, I did not find the ITE Refresher course or practice exams helpful at all. I get notices from ITE about being on the board to revise the exam. I would imagine whatever they are producing as prep will be dated.

Resources for the exam are scant so if you want it I would just recommend reading unfortunately. Transportation Planning is kind of a narrow field between traffic engineering and urban planning. ITE does not market the certificate well either.

I am studying for the AICP now, and I personally find the PTP content a little harder.
 
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