The set of choices available for transportation—or more generally, “access to destinations” (or more generally still, “access to opportunities”)—is one of the most important determinants of our quality of life. It powerfully shapes our cost of living, the extent to which large numbers of people are able to satisfy their basic needs and reasonable standards of living, and the power of our local community,
Transportation choice is also a crucial determinant of climate outcomes. Transportation is one of the top main sources of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) as well as one of the sources that has the most concerning trends. Furthermore it’s central to adapting to being resilient in the face of climate change.
And the state of transportation choices enables and is enabled by other economic systems that govern well-being and climate action like housing, energy, food, air quality, and the ability to secure valuable goods and services.
Some of the keys to creating good transportation choices:
1. Design for people
Think about and organize for transportation so that the programs and people involved with its planning, engineering, and operations are foremost responsible to solve human problems.
- Focus metrics on satisfying human needs, in particular, enabling people to reach destinations and opportunities in an economically-efficient way safely.
- Ensure people of all ages, abilities, and financial situations are able to effectively access destinations–and course-correct where that is currently not happening.
- Establish a great “fabric” for active transportation (walking, biking, and rolling in other ways) to provide good options for people to come together and communities to be cohesive, while elevating the need to make urban areas places that work well for people to be outside of cars.
- Highly value the experience of people in neighborhoods and communities that the transportation systems flow through, minimizing preventable stress, danger, noise, and other problems vehicle traffic can impose.
2. Multiple mobility solutions
Create an ecosystem that works for a diversity of travel modes and travel alternatives.
- Make communities conveniently and comfortably walkable, bikeable, and connected with excellent transit, both within themselves and to/from other places.
- Create the flexibility to satisfy people with different needs, including the people whose needs change expectedly and unexpectedly throughout the year, month, work, day, and life events.
- Coordinate systems so users can effectively link different modes on the same trips.
- Support alternatives to mobility like remote meetings/work and efficient deliveries.
3. Systemwide efficiency
Allocate investments, rights, privelages, and space to transportation systems that achieve the greatest outcomes for the resources used.
- Design communities to be space-efficient by reducing the distances between endpoints, especially housing and destinations, so people can live near where they need to go, comfortably travel by walking and biking, and access good social connections and desirable chance encounters.
- Build systems to enable high-efficiency electric vehicles like neighborhood electric vehicles and e-scooters.
- Dedicate systems and accountability to continuous improvement, with transparent reporting and planned responses to problem data (including people killed and seriously injureed in/around transportation systems) and the gap between key current states and targets.
- Meaningfully invest in structured continuous improvement, innovation, and technology advancement.
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