Linking Social Context with Transportation Planning and Funding

Abstract

Recent changes in federal transportation policy have raised expectations that future infrastructure funding priorities will now be more closely linked to the demands of transportation consumers. In the few years since passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), transportation agencies have indeed begun to place greater emphasis on public involvement, environmental impacts and alternative strategies for alleviating congestion. Yet, there remains a definite tendency to utilize traditional highway criteria and standards for evaluating and selecting transportation infrastructure, at all levels of analysis. The purpose of this paper is to explore the criteria currently used to evaluate and select transportation infrastructure projects and the major social and demographic patterns in which the projects occur. The paper begins with a brief overview of the social context in which transportation projects are being selected. This overview is not meant to be all encompassing, but rather to provide the necessary background in which to interpret the actualization of ISTEA's policies. The overview on social context is followed by a detailed discussion of the goals and objectives noted in ISTEA and a review of the criteria typically used to evaluate and select new transportation projects for funding. The paper then turns to a discussion of the interactions between social context and the criteria used to prioritize projects for funding. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary of recommendations for future research which identifies many of the links that must be forged between transportation users and project prioritization.