T4America Blog

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Posts Tagged "Connecting people to jobs and services"

Lemonade from lemons: Improvements worth celebrating within flawed infrastructure bill

Pier 1 embarcadero

Money from the finalized $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal is already flowing out to states and metro areas who are plugging it right into projects both already underway and on the horizon. After covering six things the administration should do immediately to maximize this mammoth infusion of unexpected cash, here’s a longer look at some of the law’s incremental or notable successes, with the aim of equipping the administration and advocates alike to steer this money toward the best possible outcomes.

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Two bills put “access” at the heart of transportation policy

For too long, the focus of the federal transportation program has been vehicle speed, not helping Americans access jobs, schools, grocery stores and more. It’s time to focus our funding on improving people’s access to jobs and services—and U.S. Rep. Chuy García’s (IL-4) two new bills will do exactly that. 

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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: Hey Congress, we need your help to measure access

The Des Moines Area MPO wants to make a shift to award funding the transportation projects that do the most to improve the region’s resident’s access to jobs and services. But—like most MPOs and local governments across the country—its budget for the technology that makes this possible is small. It’s time for Congress to help local communities invest in the right projects. 

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Connecting people to jobs and services week: The legislative path to make access the goal of transportation investments

Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is smart policy. But local governments, states, and metropolitan planning organizations need support from the federal government to make this happen. It’s high time for Congress to make robust travel data and analysis tools available to transportation agencies.

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Connecting people to jobs and services week: Rethinking shared mobility to prioritize access

Transportation is fundamentally about connecting people, but America’s transportation system focuses on moving cars instead. Madlyn McAuilffe from the New Urban Mobility Alliance wrote this guest post about the consequences of our misguided priorities and how we can get back to focusing on building places and transportation networks for people.

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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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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.

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Connecting people to jobs and services week: How bad metrics lead to even worse decisions

When the top priority of our transportation investments is moving cars as fast as possible, the end product is streets that are wildly unsafe—as chronicled at length last week. But this focus on vehicle speed and throughput is the result of outdated metrics that also utterly fail to produce a transportation system that connects people to what they need every day.

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