Flickr user Michael Vito (cc)
Transportation planning should include considerations beyond just transportation: land use, the environment, economic development and housing being a few.
By Josh Anderson, assistant director of Neighborhood and University Development, University of Chicago - October 1, 2014
These days, and for the foreseeable future, planners across the spectrum—land use, transportation, environmental, housing, etc.—need to do more with less by aligning efforts. “True enough,” you’re probably thinking, “but easier said than done.”
Three years ago, the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) identified that mindset as a call to action. At the time I worked at MPC as a research assistant, and I had the opportunity to co-design and draft the study Integrating Livability Principles into Transit Planning: Screening Chicago Bus Rapid Transit Opportunities—which was published yesterday in The Journal of Public Transportation Research. The study was used to develop MPC’s August 2011 report, Bus Rapid Transit: Chicago’s New Route to Opportunity, which assisted decision-makers in identifying bus rapid transit (BRT) opportunities in Chicago and helped the Chicago Transit Authority secure funding for planning BRT on Ashland Avenue. More importantly—and the reason why the Journal of Public Transportation Research decided to publish the study—is that it demonstrates how to substantively integrate land use, environmental, economic development and housing objectives into the transportation planning process.
Specifically, the study utilized an analysis that included the Livability Principles, six strategies aimed at improving the housing, transportation, environmental and equity goals of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Dept. of Transportation. These three federal agencies developed these strategies in 2009 as part of their joint Partnership for Sustainable Communities—an effort to better coordinate community investment. A recent report summarized five years of that effort.
When I developed the study, incorporating the Livability Principles into the planning process was emerging as an important consideration for states and cities that wanted to secure federal funding. That consideration gained justification in the 2013-2014 federal funding and authorization bill, MAP-21, in which land use and economic development project justifications were complementary to the spirit of the Livability Principles.
Congressional gridlock leaves little hope for sufficient infrastructure funding, a reality that’s further complicated by declining user fees and a growing maintenance backlog. Many great Chicago transportation projects have been in the pipeline for years waiting for funding. It is important to put our best foot forward when pitching these investments, whether for public or private funding. While the stalwart metrics for worthiness—travel time savings and ridership—remain important, we also need to show how transportation investments will connect population centers to employment centers, complement zoning changes, reduce carbon emissions, and so on to secure the funding we need to get those projects off the list and in the construction pipeline.
Josh Anderson is the assistant director of Neighborhood and University Development at the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement where he has dual responsibilities in neighborhood planning and municipal outreach. He advances community and economic development initiatives in the surrounding neighborhoods and coordinates University projects and campus planning with the City of Chicago and its sister agencies.