Smart Transportation is Pennsylvania DOT’s integrated response to the crisis of crumbling infrastructure, limited revenues to address it, and the need to better align transportation with community revitalization and sound land use policy. PennDOT was the first state program reviewed in detail by SSTI, and remains one of our prime examples of a thoughtful DOT wrestling with the challenges of fiscal austerity, sustainability, and system preservation. The review was done at the request of PennDOT to assess the effectiveness of its Smart Transportation program in integrating land use and transportation in its decision-making and to identify areas of opportunity to advance the Smart Transportation agenda.
land use
Smart transportation (and guidebook) a winner for both Pennsylvania and New Jersey
SSTI praised the joint efforts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey in producing an exemplary Smart Transportation Guidebook when we reviewed PennDOT’s Smart Transportation program. Now a recent article by Angie Schmitt in DC Streetsblog (“From …
Transportation and health: Policy interventions for safer, healthier people and communities
A newly published report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Partnership for Prevention, in conjunction with Booz Allen Hamilton and the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at UC Berkeley examines …
Bookends on the highway era: A view at the start and a look back from today
Fortune magazine has republished a September 1958 article that takes stock of the Interstate construction boom, just then beginning. It’s a thorough and surprisingly prescient take, and one that reminds us that our highway system …
Policy options for reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. transportation: No silver bullet
Transportation accounts for 2/3 of the nation’s oil consumption and produces between ¼ and 1/3 of all the CO2 emitted from the nation’s energy consumption. TRB established a special committee of experts to explore policy …
Have TOD promoters been putting the cart before the horse?
Building on its previous publication, Transit and Employment (2008), the Center for Transit-Oriented Development recently released a new report, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Employment. The report challenges the assumption that employment dispersal outside of central …
Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Employment (CTOD, 2011)
An exploration of the relationship between transit and job concentrations in evolving regions, in order to emphasize the importance of the destination side of the trip for both transit operations and land use planning in …
WSDOT quantifies the GHG reduction impact of sidewalk coverage.
“If you build it, they will come” seems to hold for building sidewalks. A recent report for the Washington State Department of Transportation found that increasing sidewalk coverage from 30 percent to 70 percent of …