Transportation and land use planning can seem simultaneously abstract and minute. A major planning process can stretch over several years, with the final result expressed through broad goals and detailed maps that can be hard to directly relate to people's lives.
But real impacts begin with how goals are identified and lines are drawn on maps. Not only do they shape where things are built and how people move, they have direct influence on people's well-being and the opportunities they have.
Planning should pay closer attention to those outcomes, veteran Bay Area transportation planner Dave Vautin told an audience of around 60 planners, health professionals, advocates and elected officials at Metro last week. In fact, Vautin said, planning should use those outcomes to directly guide decisions.
Vautin works with the San Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which coordinates regional transportation planning and funding in the nation's fifth-largest metropolitan area.
Vautin described in detail how his agency has employed detailed, "objective-oriented" performance measures when it does regional transportation planning. Instead of focusing on goals like how many miles of sidewalks and bikeways get built – which Vautin called an "infrastructure-oriented" measure – the agency identifies meaningful goals with a direct relation to people's health and well-being, like reducing roadway deaths and obesity. The agency developed similar measures for equity, safety, travel experience, greenhouse gas emissions and several other broad goals for the region's residents and communities.
Setting such clear measures, and modeling how different potential transportation projects affect them, allowed the Bay Area to "challenge assumptions," Vautin said. By comparing the expected benefits to project costs – financial and otherwise – his agency was able to prioritize transportation projects for funding, he said, helping decision-makers understand which projects were most beneficial at the right cost.
Vautin's visit occurred as Metro prepares to begin a major update of its Regional Transportation Plan. Members of the audience – representing a wide range of state, regional and local governments and nonprofits – were eager to explore lessons the Portland region can learn from the Bay Area's example.
While a few expressed doubt or raised concerns about how modeling and performance measures translate to potentially charged political conversations about the future of transportation, many were eager to learn how the Portland region could use similar approaches to improve decision-making and outcomes in transportation planning.
The workshop was co-sponsored by Transportation for America, a national transportation reform advocacy nonprofit. With funding from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America has undertaken a national effort to improve outcomes-based transportation planning at regional agencies like MTC and Metro, known as "metropolitan planning organizations" under federal transportation funding rules.
In the Portland region, the organization is working with local nonprofits Coalition for a Livable Future and Upstream Public Health to find ways to integrate such planning into Metro's work.
Following Vautin's presentation and remarks from Transportation for America's national outreach manager, Rochelle Carpenter, Metro planning manager Tom Kloster reflected on how the lessons from the Bay Area can improve planning here.
Metro likely doesn't have the resources to conduct as thorough an analysis as MTC carried out in its most recent regional transportation plan – not surprising given that the Portland region has about a third the population of the Bay Area.
But Kloster emphasized that strong performance measures will be critical to our region's implementation of the Climate Smart Communities Strategy, which the Metro Council could adopt next Thursday, Dec. 18, and the completion of a new Regional Transportation Plan update by 2018.
Listen to audio of most of Vautin's presentation:
See slides from the presentation: