T4America Blog

News, press releases and other updates

Posts Tagged "Access to jobs"

Reducing emissions with better transit, part two: Improve transit access

Increasing funding for transit operations is a vital first step to help more people drive less, but there’s an equally important next step: connecting more people by transit to more of the destinations they currently reach by car.

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Here’s how the new House bill prioritizes getting people where they need to go

It’s surprising, but the current federal transportation program doesn’t actually require that states spend federal funds to improve people’s access to jobs and services. This is why the bulk of transportation funding goes to increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that fails to help many people get where they need to go. The new transportation proposal from the House of Representatives fixes that with a powerful new performance measure and grant programs. 

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Here’s what happens when Jarrett Walker takes over your Twitter account

A week ago, we gave Jarrett Walker + Associates the keys to our Twitter account to explain what a transportation system oriented around improving people’s access to jobs and services (not increasing vehicle speed) actually looks like. 

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Connecting people to jobs and services week: What do destination access metrics look like in action?

Academics have long pointed to a metric called destination access—called by Transportation for America “access to jobs and services”—as a better decision guide than older, conventional measures that focus mainly on the speed of cars.  But what does this new practice look like in real life, and where and how is it already being used?

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To connect people to jobs and services, we need to measure what matters: people

Today we largely decide which transportation projects to build and where to build them based on how much delay vehicles experience, while entirely ignoring everyone not in a car in the first place. By ignoring walking, biking, or taking transit, we’re ignoring the impacts on everyone not using a car, particularly low-income persons, people of color, and older adults.

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A bipartisan effort to help states and metro areas determine if their transportation systems get you there

Providing states and metro areas with powerful data and accessibility tools can help them better measure the destinations that their residents can easily reach, equipping transportation agencies to more effectively plan investments that will help address those gaps.

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The Paris Metro in small-town Texas

While many people think of public transit as a big city service, transit also serves scores of residents in small towns and rural areas across the country. New transit in the small city of Paris, TX offers the first reliable public transportation option that residents can use to travel to work, classes, and job training.

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A bipartisan move to give states and metro areas access to better data to shape their transportation planning decisions

Congress took a bipartisan step today to give states and metro areas access to powerful data and accessibility tools to help them better assess the performance of their transportation networks by measuring what their residents can easily reach, and plan smarter transportation networks to address those gaps.

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