The Fundamentals of Effective Transportation Planning

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The Fundamentals of Effective Transportation
Planning Lecture 2 Norman Garrick
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• Transportation Planning in Case Study Cities
• All of the cities selected for case study in this
  class have had decades of experience with
  transportation planning that is oriented towards
  improving the quality of life in those cities.
• What set these cities apart from most others is
  that they have successfully implemented a
  holistic approach to transportation planning and
  provision.
• A major aspect of the project in this class is
  the characterization of the transportation plan
  for your city. You will need to consider such
  questions relating to the plan as
• What were the goals?
• What are the main elements?
• How was it implemented?
• Who are the parties in charge of implementing it?
  
• How is it different from conventional
  transportation planning?
• How successful has it been?
• Today we will look at the elements and
  considerations that go into making an effective
  transportation plan.

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What is Transportation Planning? To answer this
question, I drew on the following discussion from
Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy
Institute http//www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm50.htm_Toc
28050889 It provides a comprehensive context for
understanding transportation planning issues
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What is Transportation Planning? Planning is
the process of deciding what to do and how to do
it. Effective planning allows peoples needs,
preferences and values to be reflected in
decisions. Planning occurs at many different
levels, from day-to-day decisions made by
individuals and families, to major decisions made
by governments and businesses that have
comprehensive, long-term impacts on society.   A
basic principle of good planning is that
individual, short-term decisions are coordinated
in order to support strategic, long-term
objectives. Comprehensive planning should allow
transportation, land use, economic development
and social planning decisions to be coordinated.
The overall goal of transportation planning
should be to create a better, more prosperous and
more sustainable place.
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• Some Pitfalls to avoid in Effective
  Transportation Planning
• (The Six Deadly No-Nos)
• In most cases, contemporary transportation
  provision and planning work against the broader
  goals of creating better places. Some common
  pitfalls in contemporary transportation planning
  that contribute to this problem include
• Confusion between goals and objectives
• Confusion between development and growth
• Overlooking the broader impacts of transportation
  plans
• Planning based solely on projection of past
  trends
• Focusing only on those issues that are easy to
  measure
• Focusing on mobility and not accessibility

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1. Dont Confuse Goals and Objectives Goals are
desired outcomes to be achieved, such as health,
equity and happiness. Objectives are ways to
achieve goals. During a planning process it is
helpful to ask regularly, What are we trying to
achieve? The what is the goal we develop
objectives to achieve this goal. It is
important not to confuse goals and objectives
because Goals are fundamental we cant just
substitute one goal for another. One the other
hand, different objectives can be employed to
achieve a given goal. It is important to keep
our options open and selective the objective that
is best for the situation.
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2. Plan for Development, not for Growth Planners
must make a distinction between growth (increased
quantity) and development (increased quality).
In other words, growth means getting bigger,
while development means getting better.
Transportation plans should contribute to the
development of a place not simply to its
growth. Zurich The Little Big City In Zurich
in the 1970s, transportation planning was done
with the explicit intent that they wanted to
develop but not necessarily to grow. Other
places might be willing to accommodate both
development and growth. But the important point
is that development should be accorded the higher
priority not growth.
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3. Dont Overlook the Wider Impacts of
Transportation Plans Transportation plans always
have wide ranging impacts, affecting not just
travel but also economic, social and
environmental aspects of our lives. These
impacts may be short term or much longer term,
and they may extend across geographic and
political boundaries. If we dont consider these
wider impacts, our plans will lead to unintended
or undesirable consequences.
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Understanding the Wider Impacts of Transportation
Planning Litman define three levels of impact
from transportation planning First level
Direct impacts or changes in travel conditions
and costs.   Second level Current indirect
impacts or changes in travel behavior, tax
revenue, and external impacts.   Third level
Long-term indirect impacts or changes in land
use, economic development.
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Example of the Different Levels of Impact of a
Transportation Plan Increasing roadway
capacity can have the first-level impacts of
initially reducing traffic congestion and
increasing vehicle traffic speeds. A
second-level impact is that the increased traffic
capacity may attract additional travel from other
routes and times (Rebound Effects), and it may
create barriers to walking and cycling. A
third-level impact may be that over the long run,
land use patterns become more dispersed and
automobile dependent (Land Use Impacts).  This is
one source of so called 'induced traffic' -
traffic over and above what one would expect from
just extrapolating from the past rate of growth.
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The Different Geographic Scales of
Planning Planning also occurs at many different
geographic scales. Some geographic scales reflect
natural areas and boundaries and others just
reflect political jurisdictions (see table
below). In your project you need to be careful
in understanding at which level of geography you
are working. This can be very confusing -
sometimes plans apply to overlapping levels of
geography. Also, the impact of transportation
planning often extends beyond the boundary of the
jurisdiction for which the plan was developed.  
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4. Do Not Base Plans Simply on Predicting Past
Trends Contemporary transportation planning is
often based on using past trends to predict
future vehicle traffic. This predicted traffic
volume is then used to determine the size of new
transportation facilities. One problem with this
approach is that it assumes that the factors that
led traffic volume to increase in the past will
continue into the future. Supposedly in
banking they know that this is not a reasonable
approach since they warn you Past performance is
no guarantee of future results. We also have to
consider the long term impact of widening roads,
for example as we discussed earlier - because
they change the conditions, they can lead to
induced traffic, which in turn makes the
prediction useless. The approach of basing
planning on past trends is derisively referred to
as predict and provide planning by some.
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Kingston is an example of a place which has
experienced induced traffic
Road Widening Resulting from "Predict and
Provide" Planning in Kingston, Jamaica (source
Garrick, Half-way-Tree Rd, Kingston 2004)
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Traffic Capacity The Ultimate Solution
And yet traffic still seems not to be moving With
Canada and Mexico we could add a few more lanes
in each direction
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5. Do not focus just on those issue that can be
easily measured Vehicle traffic is relatively
easy to measure, so transportation system quality
tends to be evaluated based largely on automobile
travel conditions (e.g., average traffic speeds,
roadway Level-of-Service, vehicle congestion
delay, vehicle operating costs, parking supply).
Accessibility impacts, including impacts on
transit service quality, non-motorized transport
and land use accessibility, are often harder to
measure and tend to be ignored. This approach
tends to favor automobile-oriented solutions, and
undervalues alternative solutions to
transportation problems
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6. Focus on Accessibility not Mobility Accessibil
ity versus Mobility. In order to understand this
issue we need distinguish between traffic,
mobility and access as follows
Traffic  Conventional transportation often
reflects the assumption that transportation means
motor vehicle traffic. Mobility A more
comprehensive approach reflects the assumption
that transportation means personal mobility,
measured in terms of person-trips and
person-kilometers. Accessibility  The most
comprehensive definition of transportation is
Accessibility, the ability to reach desired
goods, services and activities. This is the
ultimate goal of transportation, and so is the
best definition to use in transportation
planning.
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Understanding the Difference between
Accessibility and Mobility
I will illustrate other aspect of access versus
mobility using seven slides Provided Courtesy
of Ian Lockwood and Paul Moore Glatting
Jackson Kercher Anglin, Inc.
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Do these two places provide the same level of
Access? Mobility?
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Detroit 1949 Street Network Access or Mobility?
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Detroit Existing Street Network Access or
Mobility?
Viewpoint in next slide
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(No Transcript)
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Proof that you can build your way out of
congestion
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What are the physical differences between these
two places?
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Access versus Mobility

• Which of these two places
• provide more access with less mobility?
• would you expect more congestion?
• would you expect more people walking?

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Before
Chattanooga, TN
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Mobility or Access?
After
Why?
Chattanooga, TN