The Vermont Agency of Transportation is working to reduce the number of state residents with suspended licenses. There are about 30,000 Vermonters with suspended licenses at any time in the state with 626,000 people. The majority of these suspensions are the result of unpaid fines, both for driving infractions as well as for offenses unrelated to driving.
access
Virginia adopts multimodal, competitive project scoring process
Last year Virginia enacted legislation to select state-supported transportation projects through a multimodal, competitive process. The law prescribed five areas to be considered in the scoring, along with project cost: congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, environmental quality and land use. The relative weights of those elements, and details of how to assess project benefits in those categories, were left to the rulemaking process, which concluded June 17.
USDA documents transportation barriers to food access among low-income households
Recently released findings from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey provide a valuable glimpse into how low-income people access food and the challenges they face meeting this most basic need. The survey, which involved 4,286 households, provides data on where people bought most of their groceries and how they travel to and from the store.
Beyond mobility—prioritizing accessibility in urban transportation
The San Francisco Transit Accessibility Map is a new online tool showing how much of the city is accessible by transit or walking within a selected travel time. Although the map is useful as is, it also presents an enormous opportunity to develop a richly layered analysis that could be used to understand accessibility more broadly by adding data on non-work as well as work destinations. It could also highlight the need to improve accessibility for underserved areas.
Accessibility moves out of the lab and into practice
Accessibility, long considered a more robust measure of transportation system success than simple mobility, is moving out of research and into practice, according to panelists on an SSTI webinar.
Report ranks metropolitan areas by transit accessibility
Researchers at the University of Minnesota released a new report ranking major metropolitan areas in terms of their accessibility to jobs by transit. The new Access Across America report complements the group’s 2013 release, which measured job accessibility by automobile, and builds upon their ongoing efforts to develop tools for assessing transportation performance in terms other than mobility and congestion.
Regional accessibility metric offers powerful approach to transportation system planning
Researchers at the University of Minnesota developed a measure of multimodal accessibility for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, which they hope can be implemented in metropolitan areas around the nation as an alternative to commonly-used congestion metrics for prioritizing transportation projects and planning system improvements. For decades, transportation system performance has been measured in terms of traffic congestion and delay, both at the project scale and the regional scale. Developers of the new accessibility measure flip the equation by asking what the value of accessibility is, rather than what the costs of congestion are.
America’s Rails with Trails: A Resource for Planners, Agencies, and Advocates on Trails Along Active Railroad Corridors (Rails to Trails Conservancy, 2013)
Instead of converting former rail lines to multi-use trails, states and municipalities are also finding that trails can be built alongside active rail lines. This report examines the characteristics of 88 rails-with-trails in 33 states, based on a survey of trail managers and the results of ongoing study over the past 20 years.
New accessibility tools available from Walk Score
For agencies that want to address the land use-transportation connection, Walk Score now provides a new form of accessibility measure, as well as data to help measure trends over time. The firm is offering a way to measure the depth of choices of destinations such as groceries or parks, in a platform called ChoiceMaps.
Free transit passes improve London’s youth and older riders’ mental health and sense of community
Two separate studies from London show that providing free transit passes can improve the sense of belonging, decrease isolation, and improve mental health in both youth and older adults.