Transportation is full of surprises.
One of them: The whole enterprise is generally managed without a logical overall purpose.
It’s true there are lots of transportation metrics: Vehicle miles traveled (VMT), number of people killed or seriously injured (KSI), modeshare, and travel time, for starters.
But what is the problem transportation is supposed to be solving to begin with?
If you said something like “to get people where they need to go,” you’d have company. That’s a common response.
And the surface, it makes sense.
But consider this:
- For the vast majority of cases, people don’t travel just to make the trip. They travel for another reason—they seek to reach or connect with something specific.
- Most people spend a large amount of money and time on their travel because few people have access to options that compete with owning and driving long distances in a car. People with lower incomes pay the highest cost: They spend a higher share of their income on driving, which is often a real strain, and the burden falls most to people who can’t afford or find housing close to their daily destinations.
- The placement of housing and key destinations like jobs, schools, and grocery stores doesn’t happen by luck. Public agencies govern what is allowed to be located where And they govern the allocation of rights, privileges, and funding among different ways people get around.
And so back in reality, thinking about the purpose of transportation as moving vehicles (principally treating cars) for the sake of moving vehicles is actually circular.
It is therefore not surprising that the transportation system, despite 100+ years of development of the car, is making us steadily poorer, sicker, and more divided, it’s one of the most likely things to kill us, and it is one of the top sources of our climate crisis.
To get our arms around the the metrics we care about, and more important, to make transportation work for us, it would help to give the system a more unified logical purpose—and one that is focused on providing measurable human benefit and doing so efficiently.
There are contenders—like access (or access to opportunity) and a subset of that, 15-minute neighborhoods.
But there is so much to do to refine and integrate those and related concepts into policy.
Cities, counties, states, and other jurisdictions who are in a position to update big-picture plans and policies could find big opportunities in this realm.
Moreworks 