Newest Resources

Planning for Quality of Life: Considering Community Cohesion and Related Social Goals.
Most people want their communities to be friendly, fair, affordable, healthy, comfortable and beautiful, and want these quality of life, social or livability goals to be considered in planning. Current transportation planning focuses on economic goals and sometimes environmental goals but tends to overlook and undervalue social goals such as community cohesion, equity, affordability, public fitness, personal security and public realm attractiveness. This report investigates these issues. It analyzes social goals, describes ways to evaluate them, and identifies strategies that can help achieve these goals and improve overall livability. This research indicates that better social impact analysis can help transportation agencies better respond to consumer preferences and community goals, providing more health and happiness.

Responsive Planning in Ideologically Conservative Communities.
Planners must work in ideologically diverse environments. This report discusses ways to be effective in conservative jurisdictions that are skeptical of new perspectives. It identifies conservative principles and describes how they can be applied to support responsive policies such as multimodal planning, TDM incentives and Smart Growth.

Comprehensive Parking Supply, Cost, and Price Analysis.
This article, published in Transportation Research Procedia, estimates the number of parking spaces per vehicle, their costs and prices. Recent surveys indicate that North American communities typically average three to eight parking spaces per vehicle, including many seldom-used government-mandated spaces. It indicates that for every dollar motorists spend on their vehicles somebody spends about a dollar on parking. This is economically inefficient and unfair since it increases total parking and traffic costs, and forces households that drive less than average to subsidize higher-mileage motorists.

Local Policies for Children's Health and Success. Better policies can create communities where children thrive.
U.S. children now have shorter lifespans and less economic mobility than in most peer countries. New research improves our understanding of these effects. It indicates that children tend to be healthier and more successful growing up in compact urban neighborhoods than in auto-dependent suburbs.

VMT as a Metric of Sustainability: Why and How to Implement Vehicle Travel Reduction Targets.
This ITE Journal (July 2024) article by Todd Litman, Ousama Shebeeb and Ronald T. Milam describes the shift from mobility-based to accessibility-based planning, which strives to minimize the amount of travel needed to access services and activities.

Urban Village Planning for Community Livability: Guidance for Creating Complete Walkable Neighborhoods to Maximize Health, Wealth and Happiness.
Urban villages are compact, walkable neighborhoods where commonly-used services and activities are easy to access by non-auto modes. Urban village planning defines the number of people and jobs, and types of services and amenities that should be located within a walkshed, the area that people will walk for local errands. By reducing land consumption, improving accessibility and reducing motor vehicle travel, urban villages provide many livability benefits including affordability, inclusivity, social equity, public health and safety, community cohesion, local environmental quality and economic development. This report identifies specific urban village planning practices and performance targets.

A Business Case for Improving Interregional Bus Services
Interregional bus service quality is poor and declining in North America. This is unfair and inefficient. Inadequate public transport deprives non-drivers of independent mobility and therefore economic opportunities and dignity, forces drivers to spend time and money chauffeuring non-drivers, reduces rural economic development, and increases traffic problems. This study examines the costs and benefits of improving interregional bus services. It concludes that there is a strong business case for providing basic service on major travel corridors and high-quality service on congested highways.

Understanding Smart Growth Savings: Evaluating the Savings and Benefits of Compact Development
Smart Growth policies create compact, multimodal communities where residents consume less land, drive less and rely more on non-auto modes. This provides various economic, social and environmental benefits. Surveys indicate that many households would prefer to live in Smart Growth neighborhoods but cannot due to inadequate supply. This study indicates that Smart Growth provides larger and more diverse benefits than conventional planning recognizes, so more comprehensive analysis tends to justify more Smart Growth policies. It concludes that to be efficient and equitable, public policies should ensure that anybody, particularly physically, economically and socially disadvantaged groups, should be able to find suitable housing in Smart Growth neighborhoods.

Cool Walkability Planning: Providing Pedestrian Thermal Comfort in Hot Climate Cities, published in the Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences.
Global warming and urbanization are increasing the number of people living in cities that experience extreme heat. This makes walking uncomfortable, unattractive and unhealthy, and causes travelers to drive for trips that could be made on foot. To address these problems hot-climate cities can create networks of shadeways (shaded sidewalks) and pedways (enclosed, climate-controlled walkways). This article introduces the Cool Walkshed Index (CWI) which rates pedestrian thermal protection from A (best) to F (worst). Analysis in this study indicates that the additional costs of these facilities can be repaid many times over through road, parking, and vehicle savings, and increased local property values.