![]() Consequently, there is a growing trend of local agencies transitioning away from the traditional level-of-service measures to vehicle miles of travel (VMT) measures. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are expressing greater interest in promoting and funding sustainable transportation infrastructure systems to reduce the damaging effects of pollutive emissions. Recently, an urgency has developed in the United States to address outdated policies and approaches to infrastructure planning, design, and construction. Transportation planning has historically relied on statistical models to analyze travel patterns across space and time. ![]() These include: collecting new data and establishing performance measures that better capture the benefits of active travel modes and their unique contributions to broad policy goals coordinating across a region to bundle pedestrian projects into larger funding packages that can meet regional significance criteria and creating regional pedestrian plans that demonstrate how smaller pedestrian projects contribute to regional goals. In addition to identifying the need for additional funding sources, the regions we studied used other strategies to address these challenges that may offer lessons for other regions. Our analysis revealed three systemic barriers at the regional level that perpetuate the underfunding of pedestrian infrastructure: (1) overall transportation funding shortages made worse by the substantial and growing burden of operating and maintaining aging regional mobility systems (2) performance and evaluation metrics used in funding decisions are biased toward regional mobility rather than accessibility and (3) the relatively small scale of individual pedestrian projects often keeps them from being considered regionally significant or scoring highly on metrics related to regional impact. We analyzed interviews along with each region's transportation plans, fiscally constrained budgets, and other policy and planning documents. To understand why this gap persists, even as attention to pedestrian issues grows, we conducted 50 interviews about pedestrian funding with transportation professionals from different levels of government in three regions that have prioritized active transportation: Chicago, Illinois Denver, Colorado and Portland, Oregon. But extraordinary gaps exist between pedestrian infrastructure needs and what is funded and built. Finally, we show that the vehicle capacity constructed to mitigate LOS may contravene the goals and aspirations of many communities in California, as well as the state's goals for GHG reductions, and is unlikely to solve the congestion problem caused by misplaced land use development.Īfter decades of inattention to the issue, cities and regions increasingly recognize the role of pedestrian infrastructure to improve safety, public health, air quality, accessibility, travel choices, and economic development. We find that a switch to VMT metrics may lead to streamlining for projects that reduce travel demand because of their location or design, whereas LOS metrics have led communities to build expensive, capacity-increasing mitigation measures to ease vehicle delay. Our analysis of LOS mitigation shows how the CEQA process per se impacts the built environment, often in ways that increase vehicle capacity and thus VMT. ![]() We compare the LOS impacts analyzed in the environmental impact reports for the projects to forecasted VMT impacts that we quantify using several available VMT estimation models. This study compares these two metrics – VMT and LOS – and their implications for a sample of land use projects located in Davis, California. California has taken the bold step to replace LOS with VMT as the metric of transportation impact in the environmental review process for land use and transportation plans and projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The focus on VMT reduction represents a dramatic shift for the land use and transportation planning fields, which have traditionally prioritized auto mobility by reducing vehicle delay, measured as level of service (LOS). Although these policies mostly promote technological innovations, some policies aim to reduce GHG emissions by reducing the amount of driving, measured in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), through land use and transportation planning. Concern about climate change has led to policies in California that aim to decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation.
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