Conference Proceedings 26 - Transportation Research Board

132 PERFORMANCE MEASURES TO IMPROVE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS AND AGENCY OPERATIONSEquity IssuesMichael covered this, so I’m not going to spend toomuch time on this because I think he covered whatthe fundamental questions are. But these are thekinds of questions that we’re being asked to addressunder environmental justice. Think back 20 years interms of what the distribution was of minority andlow-income communities, and think about what theyare today and how good a job could we have done20 years ago in terms of predicting what we havetoday. Yet the proposed regulations are expectingthat we do that in the future. I submit to you that Iwant procedures that U.S. DOT has blessed and saidare acceptable or we’re going to find ourselves in aliability situation.Environmental EnhancementsJust very quickly, more and more we’re being expectedto fund environmental enhancements, and Ithink you’re going to find that we have to have performancemeasures that indicate what kind of returnwe’re getting for investing in that.Other IssuesWhat concerns me the most in terms of some of thetypes of performance measures that we’re beingasked to develop is the expectation that we’re goingto be measuring things that transportation agencieshave little influence over, such as the type of thing Italked about before when we’re expected to keep thevehicle miles traveled (VMT) from growing at all. Itis easy to measure VMT, but in terms of setting thosestandards, we have to be concerned about this expectationand about measuring and setting standardson things that we don’t have influence over.We need to be thinking about leading indicatorsand trends that affect travel, particularly underlyingeconomic trends that are occurring. There are societaltrends, and Michael got into sustainability measures.But we’re being asked more and more to developmeasures associated with broader sustainabilityissues, including what the effect is of our plans andprojects on global warming. Think about that interms of performance measures.My final conclusion is that the questions we areincreasingly being asked to answer are not only howwe relate the performance of the transportation systemto societal values but also how societal valueschange what is expected of the transportation systemand transportation agencies.WAYS WE GROW, WAYS WE MEASUREJames CorlessI’m James Corless, California Director for the SurfaceTransportation Policy Project or STPP. We’rea nonprofit advocacy organization, a nongovernmentalagency—that is important to understandabout our perspective. We’re actually a national coalition.We have offices in Washington, D.C., and threehere in California, and we’re made up of environmentalgroups, civic groups, the National Trust forHistorical Preservation, actually over 250 groupsaround the country who really care about smartgrowth and public transit, walkable communities, livablecommunities, all the buzzwords that you hear.The reason I’m here today is that we are immenselyinterested in and concerned about the connectionsbetween transportation and the larger societal socialissues and environmental issues—land use, environment,quality of life—and we want to try to establishthose connections among these types of issues.We also want to move beyond rhetoric. We talkand hear a lot about smart growth, and certainlywe’re advocates of smart growth. But what exactlydoes that mean? In many ways, the battle over therhetoric of smart growth has been won. You cannotbe against smart growth now. But what exactly areyou for? We’re big proponents of establishing abroader range of measures that start to incorporatesome of these societal values, such broader values asquality of life, safety, livablility, and accessibility.A couple of observations I just want to make. Firstand foremost, I think the two things that really hamperthis are the lack of data and outdated indicators.For example, we are very interested in bicycle andpedestrian safety, walking and bicycling—what wecall the ‘‘green modes of transportation.’’ But wehave very little information about how much walkingor bicycling actually occurs on any government,state, federal, or local level. That makes it incrediblydifficult to assess performance when you’re talkingabout walking and bicycling and these kinds ofmodes. For instance, pedestrian fatalities have declinedin the last 20 to 30 years nationally, and thestatewide trends are very similar. But we also believe,anecdotally, that the level of walking has declined.Actually, people are walking less. There is less pedestrianactivity. That is absolutely critical when weget to accident rates.The U.S. Census, as many of you know, is a greatsource of information for many things. It is a lousy