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Tag: Access

It’s time to define transportation success by what actually matters to people: getting where you need to go

For decades, transportation departments have been measuring the wrong thing: vehicle speed.  Instead of measuring the speed of a car, we should measure the success of our transportation system by how many jobs and services people can access safely, quickly and affordably.

It’s “Connecting people to jobs and services week” here at Transportation for America. All week we’ll be exploring why improving access should be the goal of the federal transportation program—not vehicle speed. Check out our post from yesterday discussing why it’s time to throw out the traffic measurement level of service, and tune into our Twitter account later today for tweets by renowned transit planner Jarrett Walker.

The goal of our transportation system, and the $40-plus billion in federal dollars we invest each year on it, should be simple: getting people where they need to go. But that’s far from the case.

When you think back about whether or not you had a successful trip, you probably think about if you got from point A to point B and how long that trip took. But state transportation departments don’t measure success that way: they instead measure whether or not your vehicle was moving quickly at some point of the trip. Whether or not you actually arrived isn’t a consideration. And they rarely, if at all, measure whether or not you can access important destinations like jobs and other services. 

Using outdated measures like “level of service” that assess how fast traffic moves compared to free flow speeds in the middle of the night, they  assume that if the traffic is moving well on a given segment of a road that the trip was high quality and successful. In other words, an hour-long commute at high speed would be considered more successful than a 10-minute commute in a little traffic. Lost entirely in this simplistic proxy are non-car trips—we don’t measure people who walk or bike to work. 

But this 20th century technology isn’t a good measure of whether or not people have access to the things they need in their daily lives. We think that destination access, or accessibility, is a much better measure. 

Connect people to jobs and services—our third principle

Our third principle is not a new concept. What’s new is that we now have technology that makes it possible to measure success by what actually counts—reaching your destination. A few decades ago, we didn’t know where people were starting their trips from and going to. With a transportation program as we know it that began in the 1950s and 60s, we used simplistic proxies like level of service or vehicle delay or blunt measures of congestion because that was the best we could manage at the time. But now we have reams of data about where trips begin and end, where jobs are located, where people live, and where daily needs are located. With the help of cloud computing and GPS, we can measure every aspect of a trip.  

Yet the federal transportation program continues to rely on outdated 1950s metrics that assume a transportation system made up entirely of vehicles (rather than people), where the best measure we can come up with is “did your car go fast or slow for your trip?” 

It’s time to actually measure what matters as we decide where and how to invest billions in federal transportation dollars each year.

Think of destination access as the map app you likely have on your phone. When you search for a restaurant or a store, the app can tell you how long it will take to get there by different modes of transportation. And because of the millions of searches performed each day and the location data transmitted, it is now possible for states and local communities to accurately calculate access to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. These tools allow cities, states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)  to design transportation networks that maximize the ability of people to travel by whatever mode they choose and to better understand how transportation investments interact with land-use policies. 

Losing the current dangerous focus on speed and instead measuring accessibility would prioritize efficient travel and a more equitable transportation system, one where low-income communities would have increased access to jobs and services. We can hold agencies accountable to deliver these connections.

Funding should go to projects that will improve these connections, regardless of mode. State DOTs and MPOs should be held accountable by evaluating how well their investments help connect people to destinations—not whether or not they allowed traffic to move a little faster on some segment of road. 

Some states are already starting to evaluate projects this way

The Commonwealth of Virginia started using destination access to prioritize transportation projects in 2017. When deciding what new capacity projects to fund, Virginia measures how much access a given project will create and divides that accessibility score by the cost. It’s a transparent, quantitative way to prioritize limited tax-payer dollars. 

When we tie funding decisions to measurable outcomes, it creates more faith and buy-in from local communities. Connecting people to jobs and services is something everyone can agree to. 

While states like Virginia are voluntarily trying to change the process, to truly experience a sea change, the federal government needs to make improving access a fundamental priority for all transportation dollars.

Rural areas desperately need a transportation overhaul, too

People disparage rural areas with the term “flyover country,” but our federal transportation program currently treats rural areas even worse—as “driveover” country. If Congress adopts Transportation for America’s three new policy principles, transportation investments could truly help rural areas prosper. 

A focus on speed rather than safety and access would result in telling Erwin, TN that they need to widen this road and get rid of the crosswalks. Federal transportation policy doesn’t work for rural America.

This week, we released our three guiding principles and three outcomes we expect from any new investment in transportation. These ideas will start to fix our broken system and improve safety and access to opportunity for all—including rural areas. 

When I was a small town mayor in Mississippi, I fought transportation policy that treated our town like it was “driveover” or “drive-through” country. Our transportation program makes it far easier for rural communities to build highways—which residents can use to drive far away for jobs, schools, education, and other services—than it does to help rural places invest in their vital town centers. 

What the federal government doesn’t realize about rural areas is that they are not comprised of empty towns and open fields that need to be driven through as fast as possible. In reality, rural areas are dotted with countless walkable town and community centers.

In some rural areas, these walkable places are the center of commerce and activity for that town. But unfortunately, in too many rural areas, thanks to federal transportation policy that prioritizes new highway construction and roads designed primarily for speed—no matter their context—these once-thriving walkable places have been hollowed out, with jobs and services now located far away.

Our three principles would improve life in rural areas by finally treating rural areas as places to be, not places to drive away from. 

Maintenance

When I was mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, the state had 12,000 bridges that were structurally deficient. This hammers rural places especially hard. If a bridge needs to be shut down—or even worse, collapses—some areas might lose their only quick connection, and then people can’t get to their doctors, produce can’t get to market, and students can’t get to the community college. Without these bridges, rural areas are isolated. 

Unfortunately, the current federal transportation law allows states to kick the proverbial maintenance can down the crumbling road. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. (Something Mississippi did for many years, though their state DOT has recently made a drastic about-face, a story Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall outlined in our press briefing for Repair Priorities.)

That’s why our third principle, “prioritize maintenance,” would require states to fix these structurally deficient bridges before building new roads or bridges they can’t afford to maintain. It would ensure that rural places will not be stranded. 

Speed

Oftentimes, the main street of a rural community is a state highway that passes right through the heart of downtown. Because of federal design standards and a focus on the speed of travel above all other priorities, the main street is unsafe and unattractive for people to bike and walk in a very small urban grid, and it’s terrible for the local economy. 

Main streets shouldn’t be highways that get people through communities. They should be arteries that bring people in. Walkable main streets in rural areas can and should be a huge driver of economic development for a small town, generating a large, prosperous tax base in a very small area. 

In West Jefferson, NC, by prioritizing safety and access over speed, 10 new businesses opened along Jefferson Avenue—adding 55 new jobs— and the number of visitors to downtown increased by 14 percent. Four-way stop signs, crosswalks, and upgraded sidewalks were added—anathema to our broken system where speed is the top priority.

That’s why our second principle, “design for safety over speed,” would prioritize designing main streets to serve their intended functions, not as unsafe highways for speeding traffic right through a town center. Any road embedded in an urban grid where people walk and bike, where businesses or homes are located, and where an outside portion of the county’s economic base is located—like in countless rural downtowns—should never be designed for deadly highway speeds. 

Access

When state DOTs build new transportation infrastructure, they might share how wide the shoulders are going to be or brag about how much a new road will speed traffic up, but they never tell the public how transportation projects will make their lives better. That’s because improving people’s access to destinations is not how we measure success. We “measure” success by how fast vehicles are traveling, with no measurement of what destinations you can actually reach. 

Bentonville, AR’s downtown is a place to bring people to and connect to nearby neighborhoods, not to speed cars through on their way somewhere else.

Put another way, traveling for 15 minutes at 40 mph and going 10 miles is preferred to traveling for 15 minutes at 20 mph and only going five miles, for absolutely no good reason at all. If every daily need in a small town is a 15-minute drive at 20 mph, what’s the point of building a brand new road on the edge of town that can speed you along at 40 or 50 mph?

This focus on speed results in orienting every transportation project—whether in a big city or a small town—around the goal of moving cars as fast as possible, telling everyone who wants to live in vibrant small towns that the needs of their automobiles come first.

Rural areas also have higher percentages of elderly, low income, and disabled people, presenting greater challenges to connectivity and transportation infrastructure. But when access is truly prioritized—meaning that transportation projects are chosen by how they improve people’s lives by improving their access to daily destinations, no matter how they travel—everybody benefits. 

That’s why our third principle is “connect people to jobs and services.” Improving access means that instead of making a road wider for cars to drive just a little bit faster, a jurisdiction might instead build a crosswalk in a rural downtown, or add a new road to the street grid, because those investments would do far more to better connect more people to more destinations.

The goal of connecting people to the things they need—which is fundamental to the purpose of transportation—is currently missing from the federal transportation program, and this affects rural areas just like it does any big coastal city 

By making access the goal, designing local streets for safer, slower speeds, and ensuring that maintenance is more than just talking point politicians use to get more money to spend, we can improve the lives of people all across the country. 

America’s rural areas are filled with wonderful small towns and vibrant communities. It’s time for our federal transportation policy to build them up rather than pave them over. 

Click on any image below to learn more about our brand new principles or download a sharable card

Using new mobility models to increase access

New mobility services have enormous potential to change the transportation landscape and increase access for all residents. But, only a few projects are actually focused on that.

As new mobility models continue to have an impact on our transportation system and shift how our cities are designed and operate, cities and transit agencies are launching new pilot projects to test everything from microtransit to ridesourcing to automated vehicles and understand how these services can best function in and benefit their communities.

One of the most promising areas to capitalize on new mobility services is around increasing access for people most in need; people who live in areas that are currently underserved by transit, do not have bank accounts or cell phones, require wheelchair access, or commute during off-peak hours. Depending on how they’re deployed, these services could help community members more easily reach jobs, school, medical appointments, grocery stores, or wherever people need to go.

Many of these individuals are already dealing with a transportation network that has often been designed without their needs in mind—whether it’s infrequent transit, a lack of affordability, or inconsistent paratransit options. This has grown worse in recent years as many lower-income individuals, faced with the high cost of living, have been forced to move from city centers to inner and outer ring suburbs, with fewer jobs and resources and where reliable, affordable public transportation is even less likely to exist.

New mobility services have the potential to provide additional access to these communities, but have to be designed with those goals in mind. Often, projects across the country are sold on these outcomes, citing increased access to opportunity as a direct benefit, but simply piloting an automated vehicle shuttle or a microtransit service or setting up permitting processes for scooters or dockless bikeshare won’t produce these outcomes. Without careful deployment, these new services won’t help communities realize the potential benefits and could even exacerbate current inequalities.

For example, some cities have chosen to subsidize transportation network companies (TNCs) like Lyft and Uber to save money on fixed-route transit or used TNCs in place of transit altogether. While these experiments claim “improved access” as a benefit, few are designed with this as a primary goal or measurable outcome. In other cases, cities and transportation agencies design projects around the shiny new technology, next select a pilot area, and only then focus on the problem it could solve—the problem (and people being served) should come first.

For a city to truly solve its mobility challenges and actually create additional access for its residents, it needs to focus on its long-term outcomes, make thoughtful decisions about why and how it will deploy a new service, and understand how it will lead to those outcomes. This requires starting with a thorough understanding of the problems a community is facing, particularly its most disadvantaged residents, and then developing potential solutions from there.

We spoke to two communities that are currently running pilots designed to increase access to better understand how they developed their project scope, what their outcomes are, and where they think other cities and agencies could emulate their efforts.

Pinellas County, Florida—TD Late Shift

Pinellas County sits on Florida’s Gulf Coast, just west of Tampa, with a population of nearly one million. Given that beaches, tourism, and nightlife make up a major part of the county’s economy, a large share of local workers have hours that run late into the night or start early in the morning—when many transit services (including Pinellas County’s) don’t operate.

“We don’t have the density or funding to operate fixed-route service overnight, but we do have a lot of workers in the service industry,” said Bonnie Epstein, Senior Planner for Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA), the county’s transit provider. “We have beach bars and hotels and restaurants that stay open pretty late, so there’s a huge need for [additional] service.”

Understanding this challenge and with their problem clearly defined, PSTA launched the TD Late Shift pilot program in 2016. For $20 per month, many low-income county residents can purchase a monthly bus pass and also receive 25 free on-demand trips, through Uber, United Taxi, or Wheelchair Transport, to or from work anytime regular bus service isn’t running. The pilot is targeted at anyone who qualifies for the Transportation Disadvantaged (TD) program, a state-funded initiative. To qualify, residents must lack reliable transportation options and have a household income no greater than 150 percent of the federal poverty line.

Much of the thinking for TD Late Shift came out of PSTA’s Direct Connect Pilot, another ridesourcing project the agency launched earlier in 2016 that provides $5 discounts on rides to and from bus stops from the same providers as TD Late Shift. Direct Connect is open to anyone, but is only during regular transit service hours. After the Direct Connect pilot launched, the agency recognized that while it was increasing access during the day, late night and early morning commuters were still in need.

TD Late Shift was designed fill this need. According to Epstein, the goal is to improve job access by allowing people to work later shifts and know they can get to and from work, work additional shifts at different hours, and increase safety. Before the pilot, residents with late night or early morning hours didn’t have many options. “Some couldn’t get to work, some rode their bikes at 2am [often without adequate bike infrastructure], and some often had to wait late at night for someone to pick them up,” said Epstein. “With these on-demand, late night rides, residents have more time to spend with family, can sleep longer and are safer since they don’t have to wait outside late at night or walk or bike on potentially dangerous streets.”

So far, the program has proved popular as ridership has grown since its launch in 2016 and is slated to run through the end of June 2019.

Detroit, Michigan—Woodward 2 Work

The City of Detroit’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) launched a similar project in early May of this year that is also focused on increasing access for late shift workers. While Detroit does not have the beaches of the Gulf Coast, it has many residents working late shifts who lack reliable and safe door-to-door commuting options.

The Woodward 2 Work (W2W) pilot provides discounted Lyft rides to anyone going to or from an eligible bus stop on the Route 53-Woodward bus line. Route 53 runs 24 hours a day, beginning just south of Eight Mile Road at the northern edge of the city and connecting straight to the heart of downtown, an almost nine mile trip. DDOT chose Route 53 because of the large number of riders it could reach, especially those working later shifts.

To use the service, potential riders need to text “W2W” to the project hotline between 12am and 5am. In response, riders receive a code they enter into the Lyft app—or use over the phone through Lyft’s Concierge service—for a $7 discount on any ride.

This is the first partnership for DDOT with a TNC and the department wanted to make sure they got it right. Before the pilot started, DDOT conducted community outreach through surveys and personal interviews in order to clearly identify community challenges and build a project from those needs. “We didn’t want to pose a solution before defining the problem,” said Stacey Matlen, Senior Mobility Strategist at DDOT. “We knew there were a number of challenges for people walking to and from the bus stop at three in the morning, so we conducted interviews with late shift workers and created personal journey maps to understand everything these customers encounter.”

DDOT came up with a number of possible pilot ideas from the information they gathered during their outreach. Then, they took these concepts back to the community to see how well they might fit. “We saw that a lot of people were carpooling, so we thought about that [as a pilot], but received feedback from users through scenario testing that that’s not necessarily what either group of employees (riders and drivers) wanted,” said Kenny Fennell, also a Senior Mobility Strategist at DDOT. Through these conversations, DDOT developed W2W as a pilot that would make more sense with the community’s needs and desires.

Designing with access in mind

DDOT’s pilot is a great example of how cities can think about improving access from the ground up with the user’s perspective in mind and without a predetermined solution. Unfortunately, many cities develop pilot projects with a specific technology or service they want to deploy, such as automated vehicles or microtransit, and then go searching for problems it could solve. There is often no process of outreach and community engagement to determine how the service can best help improve access for their residents.

Instead of starting with a potential solution in mind, or a particular technology, PSTA and DDOT used a robust community engagement process to ensure the end user was involved from the beginning. They focused on their communities’ needs and put together a project that would best serve them.

With DDOT, the department made a clear decision from the start to bring these new services to the people who have the most to benefit from them. “To ensure equity, the design and decision making process should take into account how the most under-resourced user will be affected,” said Fennell. Matlen echoed this view, noting that “getting out of the building and interviewing stakeholders to know what their problems are and how our projects can help” is the most essential component of the process.

Both PSTA and DDOT did an excellent job of identify local mobility challenges, sourcing ideas from the community, and then designing an appropriate solution. For DDOT, the most important metric they’re tracking for the project is how many riders they’re getting to work and continuing to conduct interviews with riders in order to refine the pilot along the way.

With TD Late Shift, PSTA also designed the service specifically around the needs of its users that did not have access to fixed-route service or the Direct Connect pilot to get to work and made sure it was accessible for lower-income individuals, individuals without a bank account or credit, and wheelchair users. The agency has continued to learn from its efforts and has worked to continuously improve the pilot to better serve its users. As ridership continues to grow, PSTA is hoping to make it a permanent fixture of its service.

With both pilot projects, there are still plenty of questions over how best to gauge how well these pilots are meeting community needs, how they can improve service to include more riders, and how to more directly link them up to other long-term outcomes. But what’s most important is that they’re engaging with their communities to ask these questions and actively look for answers.

Seniors and transit report generates widespread coverage and discussion

Last week, we released Aging in Place, Stuck without Options, documenting the more than 15.5 million Americans 65 years and older who, by 2015,  will live in places with poor or non-existent public transportation.

The report ranked metro areas according to the percentage of seniors projected to face poor transit access, and asked: How do we address the shrinking mobility options of baby boomers who wish to stay in their homes and “age in place?” What happens when people in the largest generation in American history outlive their ability to drive for everything?

The discussions we saw in the comments of blog posts and newspaper articles were very interesting. It’s an immediately relatable story, because almost everyone has a parent or grandparent currently dealing with or facing the prospect of getting older and staying mobile.

Accommodating seniors who want to age in place  — most of them do — will be a challenge for our nation’s transportation system. But there is a lot that we can do. We can increase funding for bus routes, paratransit, vanpools and ridesharing. We can provide incentives for community non-profits to operate their own systems. We can encourage states to involve seniors more intimately in the planning process and ensure officials are still able to “flex” federal dollars for transit projects. We can also prioritize “complete streets” that meet the needs of all users, including older Americans on foot, in wheelchairs or on their way to a transit stop.

All of these ideas can — and should — be folded into the next transportation bill currently being drafted in Congress.

The report generated widespread coverage and discussion. In response to the report’s findings, the San Francisco Bay Area gave itself a pat on the back for its top rank, with the San Francisco Chronicle referring to the region as “a good place to retire the car keys,” while the Kansas City Star reacted to its region’s poor ranking. The Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money offered a nice summation of the report’s overall findings.

Some argued that our recommendation to meet seniors where they are is backwards. Rather than extending transit out, they said, we ought to encourage older adults to move to places that already have robust transportation systems. Tanya Snyder surveyed both sides of the debate, which also played out in the comments section and on Twitter, at Streetsblog Capitol Hill:

Those recommendations might help geographically isolated seniors reach services, but is it really the responsibility of the taxpayer to subsidize the decisions people have made to live in places that explicitly reject transit accessibility? Should those inefficient, low-density, sprawling areas be retrofitted with transit now that their populations are aging?

Cristina Martin Firvida, who works on these issues for AARP, said helping seniors marooned in those areas helps everybody. And besides, the suburbs were built through federal policies encouraging outward development after the second world war, she said – it’s not just that one person built a house on top of a mountain and then demanded that taxpayer-subsidized transit come to them. “The suburbs is where our economy and our entire society has moved to since the fifties,” Firvida said.

No one took more umbrage with our report and conclusions than the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole, whose response to the growing mobility needs of America’s seniors was a glib: “So what?” While O’Toole is dismissive of the desire for greater options, AARP’s research found that public transportation use among older Americans increased by 40 percent since 2001 (see graphic below). And this is despite the fact that many live in areas with spotty and less-than-reliable service to begin with. T4’s David Goldberg responded to O’Toole last week.

You can still check out the full report and see how your area ranked here.