1. The Fundamentals of Effective Transportation Planning
Norman Washington Garrick CE 4710/ Fall Lecture 02

2. This class outlines the framework for
a Transportation Planning Process that aims to create
a sustainable transportation system

3. What is Transportation Planning?
This class is based on the following discussion from
Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute

4. What is Transportation Planning?
Planning is the process of deciding what to do and how to do it.
Effective planning allows people’s 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.

5. Six Elements of Effective Transportation Planning
The following six principles are key to ensuring that transportation plans support the social, environmental and economic goals of the society
Understand the difference between goals and objectives
Plan for development not growth
Keep in mind the broader impacts of transportation plans
Plan based on desired outcomes, not on projection of past trends
Consider all relevant issues, not just those that are easy to measure
Focusing on access and not mobility

6. 1. Don’t 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 can’t just substitute one goal for another.
On the other hand, different objectives, or a set of objectives, can be employed to achieve a given goal. It is important to keep our options open and select the objective that is best for the situation.
Goals are usually long term in nature – objectives have more short term outcomes

7. Reducing Highway Congestion
Goal or Objective of Transportation Planning?
Reducing highway congestion is a very important issue but should it be treated as a fundamental goal of transportation planning?
When highway congestion reduction is treated as the top line goal of transportation planning, the risk is that almost any remedy is seen as appropriate. For example, to reduce congestion many cities have taken down buildings to widen roads. This is like harming the patient to cure them. It also makes it hard for walkers and bikers and also increases the distances between destinations.
On the other hand, if we consider the goal of transportation planning to be making it easier and cheaper for people to get to where they need to be, then highway congestion reduction becomes just one tool for achieving this goal. We will then not take steps to reduce congestion that make it harder for people who walk, bike or use transit.

8. 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. .

9. 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.

10. 3. Don’t 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 don’t consider these wider impacts, our plans will likely lead to unintended or undesirable consequences.

11. Understanding the Wider Impacts of Transportation Planning
Litman defines 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.

12. 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, forcing more people to drive.
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.

13. This concept also applies to parking
Induced Traffic
Traffic Volume
Actual Traffic
Induced Traffic
Predicted Traffic
Date of Widening
Years
This concept also applies to parking
Click above to link to Washington Post article about UConn Research on induced traffic

14. 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.

15. 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.
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 referred to as ‘predict and provide’ planning by some.

16. (source: Garrick, Half-way-Tree Rd, Kingston 2004)
Kingston, Jamaica
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)

17. 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).
Many other transportation 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

18. 6. Focus on Access not Mobility
In order to understand this issue we need distinguish between traffic, mobility and access as follows:
Vehicle Traffic 
Conventional transportation often reflects the assumption that transportation means motor vehicle traffic.
In this approach all vehicles are treated the same
Personal Mobility
A more comprehensive approach reflects the assumption that transportation means personal mobility, measured in terms of person-trips and person-kilometers.
In this approach transit is given priority over cars, walking and biking is considered
Access 
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.
In this approach we consider land use issues as well as travel options

19. Why we need to distinguish between Vehicular Traffic and Personal Mobility?

20. Access not Mobility
The only way to fully consider ACCESS in planning is to treat transportation and land use as an integrated system.

21. What are the physical differences between these two places?

22. Access versus Mobility
Which of these two places
would you expect more people walking?
would you expect more congestion?
provides more access with less mobility?