Metropolitan Accessibility and Transportation Sustainability
Principal Investigators: Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, Lidia Kostyniuk, Laurie Wargelin, Qing Shen, Carl Simon, and Susan Zielinski.
Units Involved: Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, College of Literature, Arts, & Sciences, Ford School of Public Policy, Institute for Social Research, Center for the Study of Complex Systems, Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation Initiative and University of Maryland.
Brief Project Description: Transportation policy—a prime shaper of the built environment in metropolitan areas—has historically been guided by the idea of ensuring and improving mobility. But it is accessibility—the capacity to reach destinations—that is the service people seeks in a transportation system. We argue that sustainability in transportation and the built environment is furthered by a policy shift from mobility to accessibility as an overarching evaluative framework. This project will support such a shift by developing and estimating—for the first time—measures of accessibility that will enable a meaningful comparison between multiple metropolitan areas of the United States. An outcome of the research will be a new method—in the form of indicators that can be analyzed both within and between regions—by which to gauge the progress of policy on infrastructure and the built environment toward sustainability.
The project will develop multiple measures of accessibility for 10-15 mid- to large-sized metropolitan regions. To inform land-use and transportation planning at the level of metropolitan region, the project will seek to explain factors underpinning the differences in the accessibility observed among the selected regions. It will explore the connection between accessibility and characteristics of the built environment of the metropolitan regions, developing several measures of urban form and transportation-provision characteristics. These will be analyzed as inputs determining accessibility and sustainability outcomes.
Significant Accomplishments (as of January 1, 2009)
External Funding:
- “Youth, Age, and Transportation Accessibility.” Michigan Center for Advancing Safe Transportation throughout the Lifespan (M-CASTL) $96,634.
- “Gauging Progress Toward Accessibility.” Federal Highway Administration. $118,569.
- “Metropolitan Accessibility and Transportation Sustainability: Comparative Indicators for Policy Reform.” Environmental Protection Agency-Science to Achieve Results (STAR). $300,000.
Presentations:
- “Metropolitan Accessibility and Transportation Sustainability: Comparative Indicators for Policy Reform.” Conference of NECTAR (Network for Communication and Transportation Activity Research), Rotterdam, 2008.
- “Metropolitan Accessibility and Transportation Sustainability: Comparative Indicators for Policy Reform.” Environmental Protection Agency Grantees' Conference, Washington DC, 2008.
- "Transportation Accessibility and Metropolitan Sustainability." Invited Lecturer, Ben Gurion University, Sde Boqer, Israel, 2008.
- "Transportation Accessibility and Metropolitan Sustainability." Invited Lecturer, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, 2008.
- "Transportation Accessibility and Metropolitan Sustainability." Invited Lecturer, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, 2007.
- Keynote address, University of Minnesota Transportation Center Conference, 2007. o Invited Lecturer, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Colorado, Denver, 2007.