by Phil Braum

ISTEA Planner's Workbook

Transportation shapes our communities and touches much of our lives. Because their effects are so pervasive, transportation systems should be designed and operated to produce benefits across the broadest set of societal values. That can only be achieved if planning for transportation improvements reflects those values and the relationships of transportation to other aspects of our society.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) responds to this need by establishing strengthened federal requirements for comprehensive transportation planning. ISTEA lists planning factors that must be a part of the transportation planning process conducted by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and state departments of transportation (DOTs).

The planning factors address many of the ways that transportation relates to other values. The factors include consideration of the overall social, economic, energy, environmental, and land-use effects of transportation decisions. They include consideration of the six management systems--pavement, bridge, safety, congestion, public transportation, and intermodal transportation--that ISTEA also requires. Many of the factors concern issues that have not traditionally been addressed by transportation plans and programs. The chart that follows this discussion provides sample considerations to be addressed under the 15 factors that are required to be considered by MPOs and the 23 that are required for DOTs.

The planning factors are particularly significant for DOTs, as they have never before been subject to a federal mandate for transportation planning. Some DOTs have had planning processes in place to support their own objectives, but many others have relied upon narrow performance measures and political concerns to guide decisions. For MPOs, the factors are less novel; MPOs have established planning processes. But in some metropolitan areas, the MPO has not addressed the breadth of concerns that the factors include.

Adequate attention to the planning factors will require substantial changes in the way that planning is done in many metropolitan areas and states, including new procedures and greater effort. Assuring that planning processes respond to the factors requires attention to four aspects of the process. One is the policy framework that guides planning and decision-making. The second is the technical methods used to quantify and analyze planning issues. Third is the decision processes used to weigh the results of the analyses and to translate them into plans and programs. Finally, there are the intergovernmental relationships that should allow multiple agencies to cooperate on decisions that cut across functional responsibilities.

Policy Framework: applying the factors requires an explicit policy framework. To serve as decision criteria, policies must be formally stated in a form that can be publicly debated and that can help to guide choices.

ISTEA provides more flexibility in the way federal funds are used to allow a metropolitan area or state to pursue its own vision. Funds can be transferred between highways and transit programs, and can be used for transportation enhancements and other types of projects never before eligible for funds. Funding is less constrained by program categories and more responsive to the regional and state decision processes. This flexibility makes it especially important that the values that underlie decisions are clearly stated and understood. Different areas may have different views of the importance of such concerns as air quality and sprawl. ISTEA gives each metropolitan area and state greater freedom to pursue its own vision, but that requires that the vision be made explicit.

Some transportation planning processes fall short of the needed policy considerations. Because they focus on projects to be built, the majority of the effort spent on plan preparation goes into project justification, not on the consideration of the larger concerns.

Many traditional regional transportation plans begin with a statement of policies. In some cases, those policies are too narrowly focused on transportation system performance such as acceptable travel times or levels of congestion on different types of roadways. The resulting plan may improve the transportation system at the expense of other values. More common is a set of policies that are generalizations; they make positive statements that are so vague that they have little effect upon decisions. The developers of these plans can claim that they have considered a broader set of concerns, but the results are the same as if the plan had no such policy pretense.

Several of the ISTEA planning factors are especially important for policy expression, as they represent the broadest societal concerns. The most sweeping of the factors is the requirement that planning consider the overall social, economic, energy, and environmental effects of transportation decisions, a factor that applies to both MPOs and DOTs. Taking this factor seriously can create a new focus for transportation planning in many places, as it includes concerns not often incorporated in the evaluation of transportation improvements.

Policies concerning land use are also vital, as transportation is an important determinant of development patterns. New and expanded transportation facilities can contribute to the continuing dispersion of development by increasing the accessibility of remote locations. This dispersion contributes to increasing travel demand that then requires additional expansion of the transportation system. Both MPOs and DOTs are required to consider the effects of transportation decisions on land use and development and the consistency of transportation plans and programs with all land-use plans. Many MPOs and virtually all DOTs have traditionally considered land use as a given to which transportation systems must respond, rather than recognized the interaction between accessibility and development. They argue that land-use decisions are controlled by local governments and market forces. This factor mandates that MPOs and DOTs recognize the development influence of their transportation decisions and include that consideration in their plans.

Development of policies to preserve existing facilities and to use them more efficiently to meet transportation needs will cause the explicit recognition of this concern. The better use of existing facilities is being forced in many areas because of fiscal, environmental, and community constraints on building new facilities. Yet the urge to build is strong, and many elected officials like the visibility to voters of new facilities. Establishing formal policies on this subject should prompt the kind of debate that will lead to more rational decisions.

Some of the factors create entirely new responsibilities. Many MPOs and DOTs have no policies on these subjects because they had ignored the subjects in the past. For example, DOTs are required to consider strategies for incorporating bicycle and pedestrian facilities into projects. Many DOTs had considered these subjects to be outside their areas of responsibility.

Formal policy statements on these and other factors provide the basis for public discussion of the values guiding transportation system development, and create the opportunity for a broader consensus.

Technical Methods: addressing the factors requires adequate means of analysis. Some of the factors are straightforward and require no special technical tools. For example, consideration of the connectivity of roads within a metropolitan area to those outside it is raises no technical challenges. Other factors use technical methods that are already well established, such as the consideration of transportation system management actions by DOTs. But for a third group, the existing methods are insufficient. In some cases, this is because the factors require attention to concerns that MPOs and DOTs have not addressed in the past. Several of the factors require better methods because they call for consideration of complex relationships that are inherently difficult to analyze.

The complexity of environmental effects illustrates the need for better techniques in some areas. The air-quality consequences of transportation system changes are affected not only by changes in travel patterns but also by topography, weather patterns, and vehicle technologies. Air quality is a special concern for transportation plans not only because of the planning factors in ISTEA but also because of the requirements of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that transportation plans and programs conform with air-quality improvement plans in areas that do not attain air-quality standards. More sophisticated mathematical models that replicate air-quality conditions are being developed; they must be applied in areas where air quality is a problem.

The effects of transportation decisions upon land use is another complex consideration. Land use is influenced by many factors besides transportation, including geography, economic conditions, local zoning and subdivision controls, historic patterns, and community expectations. Determining the effects of transportation system changes on development patterns is difficult; projecting those effects years into the future as part of the development of the long-range transportation plan is even more so because of the variability caused by those other influences.

Mathematical models have been developed that attempt to reflect the forces that affect land use, but they require large amounts of data that is expensive to collect, and their results are not always valid. They have not been widely used in transportation planning. But the wider adoption of geographic information systems by state and local governments is making land-use data more readily available. The continuing expansion of the power of computers is increasing the ability of models to deal with complex problems. Renewed interest in land-use planning tools is leading to further efforts to improve their usefulness.

Freight is a new subject for many MPOs, so they have inadequate data about freight movement and little familiarity with the private businesses involved in freight movement. Traditional transportation plans assumed that a transportation system that served personal travel well would also serve freight. The designation of truck routes on highways was the extent of most freight planning. New attention to freight facilities and services will require better techniques for data collection and analysis.

New methods and techniques are being developed; MPOs and DOTs must devote adequate resources to the use of those technical methods in their planning processes.

Decision Processes: visionary policy statements and sophisticated technical methods mean little if the results are ignored in developing plans and programs. The decision process is the key aspect of shaping the transportation system.

Defining a decision process to reflect all of the factors is no easy task, and will have different results in different places. Because the factors address such a wide variety of concerns, there is no single measure that can be used to evaluate any given transportation improvement, no single score that can be used to rank projects. In any event, the planning process is a political process as well as a technical process. An overriding objective of planning should be to clarify public goals and provide the information needed to support the debate that is the basis of public decisions.

Decision processes have been complicated by the program flexibility that ISTEA created. Because there is greater ability to shift funds between program categories, projects competing for funding may have very different characteristics, and so be difficult to compare using strictly transportation-based measures. The comprehensive process required by the planning factors can help solve that problem. Projects must be evaluated for their contribution to the overall values of the metropolitan area or state, not solely against narrow transportation-system-performance measures. This allows more even-handed comparison of projects that involve different transportation technologies and modes.

The factors must inform transportation decisions at several levels in the planning process. They must guide the development of the long-range plan that defines the overall concept of the transportation network, and must also be used in decisions about the implementation of individual projects that will move toward that plan.

The long-range plan is important because it most directly expresses the metropolitan area's or state's vision. It is a reflection of how the metropolitan area or state views the importance of the factors and how the transportation system is to relate to them. The broadest of the factors, those relating to land use, environmental effects, and energy policies, are the most important at this level of planning, but all of the factors must be considered because the plan constrains the projects that will follow.

The translation of the plan into reality occurs through the definition of projects to achieve the plan, and their inclusion in the Transportation Improvement Program. The selection of projects to be included in the program is one of the key steps in transportation system development. The selection may be among projects that are necessary to accomplish the long-range plan or ones that are advanced for some other reason. In this step, the policy framework must provide the basis against which projects are judged, and the technical analysis must provide the necessary information to evaluate a project. The decision process must then be appropriately structured to allow the most beneficial projects to be chosen. The inter-relationships of the steps in this process are demonstrated in the following chart.

Intergovernmental Coordination: because the factors address a variety of concerns, some cut across the existing functional responsibilities of different agencies. Since real problems do not respect agency charters, solutions must transcend them as well. Developing improved transportation planning processes that allow for the participation of multiple agencies can be a challenge because different agencies may have different and even conflicting interests.

Some of the factors address concerns that are not in the purview of MPOs and DOTs. An agency may have ignored those concerns on the grounds that it cannot be responsible for decisions beyond its control. Transportation planners are understandably reluctant to tie their plans to the actions of other agencies that may have no interest in the transportation system or that may be pursuing other objectives in opposition to the planners' interests.

In some areas, responsibility for specific transportation functions are assigned to agencies that are independent of the MPO and DOT. For example, some areas have airport authorities that are functionally separate from other transportation responsibilities. Airport siting, expansion, and operations have dramatic effects on roadway and public transit needs, but an airport authority may focus more on air traffic needs, airlines' desires, and funding programs than on ground access issues.

Other factors are complicated by the location of responsibility at different levels of government. The most apparent of those is the control of land use. Both MPOs and states are required to consider the effects of transportation decisions upon land use and the consistency of transportation plans and programs with all land-use plans. The connection between land use and transportation is a powerful one. The transportation system creates accessibility that affects development patterns; those patterns are a determinant of travel demand and the relative attractiveness of different modes of transportation. But land use is primarily under the control of local governments, through zoning and subdivision controls. Local governments' land-use decisions in many areas are driven by an interest in increasing the property-tax base and in avoiding citizen complaints about undesirable uses, not by concerns about transportation system needs. It is crucial that transportation planning agencies work closely with local governments to encourage land use decisions that take transportation into account.

Some of the factors specifically address the need for better intergovernmental coordination. For example, DOTs are required to consider metropolitan area plans developed by MPOs and to consult with local elected officials with jurisdiction over transportation as they consider the transportation needs of non-metropolitan areas.

The literature on intergovernmental coordination is extensive; this is not a new problem nor one that is unique to transportation planning. The need for improved transportation planning processes alone will not create the impetus for solutions, but adequately addressing the planning factors will, in some places, require changes in intergovernmental mechanisms.

At the very least, this may include improved communications among agencies to simply keep others informed of their activities. More substantial changes may include participation in advisory committees and interagency technical committees. In some cases, changing the make-up of the MPO board to create new representation may be needed to adequately involve the necessary interests.

Changing the Process: responding to the planning factors in every metropolitan area and state in the country will be a gradual process. Doing so will require the improvement or replacement of established practices. Existing practices have typically been crafted to satisfy local political conditions and interests, so change will not come easily. New tools to analyze the consequences of transportation decisions will need to be adopted and applied by transportation planners, and new means of cooperation among participants in the planning process will have to be established. That will take greater effort and resources that are not easily made available.

But these changes will occur. The limits on public funds for transportation system maintenance and improvement require that we do a better job of allocating scarce resources. Continuing concerns about the environmental effects of transportation systems challenge us to develop them in less damaging ways. Growing awareness of the interrelations among transportation and other aspects of our culture require that our planning be more comprehensive, more technically sophisticated, and more effective.