Performance Measures

"Smart Mobility 2010: A Call to Action for the New Decade" responds to today's transportation challenges with new concepts and tools, presented with a program for putting them into action.

10 Principles:

1. Mobility Balance,
2. Street Connectivity,
3. Community Character,
4. Forecasting is not Planning,
5. Transit will not Alleviate Congestion,
6. Active Living,
7. Multimodal Streets,
8. Sustainable Mobility,
9. Empowerment,
10. Monitoring & Reporting

Presentation showing different roads across the country that have gone on road diets

Changing Policies To Support Complete Streets, resulting consequences, levels of service (LOS) analysis generates impacts to other modes and the environment, Relationship of Freeway LOS, Speed, and CO2 Emissions Factors, case study in Davis, CA.

Instead of relying on vehicle LOS as the primary performance measure in transportation impact studies, agencies need to consider the tradeoffs between LOS and other important community values and other modes. This paper will present a new paradigm for transportation planning and impact analysis that reflects the inherent tradeoffs associated with vehicle travel, urban development form, and the treatment of other modes. The new paradigm will reflect a fundamental change in our current thresholds based analysis approach and it will demonstrate new analysis methodologies

With communities across the country now recognizing the importance of "complete streets," what does implementation of a city or county's complete streets policy actually look like? While bike lanes and sidewalks are an important component of making a complete street, the underling design guidelines and policies for roadways and parking are equally influential in creating livable communities.

Context Zones—Every thoroughfare has an immediate physical context created by buildings and activities on adjacent properties and is also part of a broader context created by the surrounding neighborhood or district. While the elements of context can combine in almost infinite varieties, this report uses four context zones to define and categorize urban areas: suburban (C-3), general urban (C-4), urban center (C-5) and urban core (C-6).

Creating Quality Main Streets—Main streets may be located in any context zone, but are most commonly found in suburban (C-3), general urban (C-4) and urban center (C-5) contexts. They are usually short segments of arterial or collector streets, often only a few blocks in length. They are within a grid or interconnected system of local streets serving the commercial center of town.

Information contained in the report uses urban context to describe adjacent surroundings, then uses context to help select compatible thoroughfare types and design criteria. Context zones are used to categorize urban development density and intensity.

There are several design controls in the application of CSS principles that may be used differently than in the conventional design process. These controls include speed, location, design vehicle and functional classification.

The thoroughfare designer is challenged by the need to balance automobile mobility with the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, transit, public space and urban design elements. While this report emphasizes CSS primarily in walkable, mixed-use residential and commercial urban areas, there are many urban areas with corridors or large districts that, by their nature, are low intensity and low density and do not provide the mix of uses, development patterns, or roadway networks conducive to walking.

This paper discusses the growth of the Complete Streets movement and its role in road design and planning processes, particularly in relation to Context Sensitive Solutions. We will then go on to describe how the geometric design of our urban arterials and collector streets can provide more room for nonmotorized travelers, make street crossings easier for pedestrians, and help to control traffic speeds, thus reducing pedestrian, bicycle and automobile crashes. Finally, we will show how this can be done within existing rights-of-way and within tight maintenance and construction budgets, thus making better use of taxpayer dollars. A discussion of cost considerations will conclude this paper.

A survey of 31 multi-family housing complexes near rail stations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, show peak parking demand is 25-30 percent below supplies and, for most projects, falls below national standards.

Benefits of road diets for bicyclists and pedestrians?

• Provide space to add bicycle lanes
• Reduce crossing distance
• Eliminate or reduce "multiple threat" crash types
• Install crossing island to cross in 2 simple steps
• Reduce top end travel speeds
• Buffer sidewalk from travel lanes (parking or bike lane)
• Reclaim street space for "higher and better use" than moving peak hour traffic

A look at baseline results from parent surveys and student travel tallies, including: introduction, parent survey analysis, student arrival and departure travel tally analysis, discussion.

Complete Streets are designed and operated so they work for all users—pedestrians, bicyclists. Incomplete Streets Breed Congestion—Designing streets only for automobiles reduces opportunities for safe travel choices that can ease traffic congestion: walking, bicycling, and taking public transportation. Americans drove almost three trillion miles in 2008,1 and many of those trips were very short. Half of all trips in metropolitan areas are three miles or less and 28% are one mile or less. In rural areas, 30% of all trips are two miles or less, and yet a vast majority of these trips are by automobile.

Incomplete streets will hamper climate change strategies—The transportation sector is the fastest growing carbon dioxide source in the United States with emission rates rising 2% per year. Projections show that more efficient fuels and 'clean' vehicles won't be enough to offset the projected 59 percent increase in driving between now and 2030. Even with expected improvements in vehicle and fuel economy, carbon emissions from transportation would be 41 percent above today's levels by 2030 if driving is not curbed.

Roadway Design Objectives should include: a roadway environment that the user can: Interpret correctly and safely, Minimize their mistakes, Minimize impact of their mistakes

The objective of this research was to investigate whether a relationship exists between street network characteristics and the choice of transportation modes selected in a neighborhood. In this study, we controlled for factors such as street characteristics, vehicle volumes, activity levels, income levels, proximity to limited access highways and to the downtown area. The results suggest that all three of the fundamental characteristics of a street network — street connectivity, street network density, and street patterns — are statistically significant in affecting the choice to drive, walk, bike, or take transit.

The paper examines the role of the street network in road safety outcomes. Data on more than 130,000 crashes occurring over nine years in 24 medium-sized California cities was input into a geographic information system (GIS) and evaluated against principal measures of street network density and connectivity at the Census Block Group level. Few studies have taken this more comprehensive approach of looking at the complete street network when it comes to safety, partly because until now this kind of holistic assessment would have been very difficult without recent advances in research tools such as GIS.

Evolution of network in California cities; the effects the network has on traffic safety, travel mode choice, and emergency services response time.

The Collaborative's Transportation Team has been particularly focused on practices that will assist the Sacramento countywide area achieve the vision of at least at 10% shift in travel mode from automobiles to walking, cycling, and transit. Transit use is forecasted to increase from 1.3% of trips to 4% or 5% or more, in the Sacramento countywide area.

Connectivity (also called permeability) refers to the directness of links and the density of connections in path or road network. A well-connected road or path network has many short links, numerous intersections, and minimal dead-ends (cul-de-sacs).

As connectivity increases, travel distances decrease and route options increase, allowing more direct travel between destinations, creating a more Accessible and Resilient system.

This report investigates claims that highway capacity expansion is a cost effective and desirable solution to urban traffic congestion problems.