Designing New Planning Measures of Transportation System Performance

[i]Call to partecipate[/i] Roundtable Discussion Joint Conference American Collegiate Schools of Planning Association of European Schools of Planning July 6-12, 2008 Chicago, Illinois One of the most challenging aspects of transportation planning research in North America and Europe is developing pertinent, accurate, reliable, verifiable, reproducible, and generally understandable measures to describe, analyze, and evaluate initiatives proposed, designed and implemented to improve transportation system performance. Cases in point of transportation planning strategies include transportation demand and supply management, sustainable transport best practices, intermodal integration, walkability standards, teleworking programs, connectivity hierarchies, and mobility-based land use planning and zoning. All of these ideas and approaches have great conceptual appeal. However, and although these and numerous other ways to improve transportation planning have been known for decades in North America and Europe, a major problem remains. That is, only limited progress has been made in achieving robust measures of the effectiveness, efficiency, equity, or utility of these initiatives for planning purposes, and especially in the increasingly important and realms of ecosystem-based and sustainability-based planning. This session provides a venue for presentations on designing, proposing, prescribing, or demonstrating new or different and more robust ways of measuring how, and how well transportation systems, sub-systems or components are performing. Of particular interest are discussions of how planning theories and principles affect the design of the measures, and discussions of experiences in introducing, championing, implementing, testing, and evaluating the new measures of transportation system performance. To promote the broad exchange of information between North American and European planners on this critical transportation planning research and applications topic, the roundtable discussion is open to new measures of transportation system performance for any mode involving people, data, or freight, that is, walk, cycle, transit, private motor vehicle, teleworking, rail, water, air, and pipeline in rural, urban and regional planning contexts. Roundtable Co-Organizer and Moderator: [url=mailto:wellarb@uottawa.ca]wellarb@uottawa.ca[/url]