Details:

Creators:
Sullivan, Jim ; Sears, Justine ; Glitman, Karen
Sullivan, Jim ; Sears, Justine ; Glitman, Karen Less -
Corporate Creators:
Transportation Research Center Inc
Subject/TRT Terms:
[+]
Aged Livability Passenger Transportation Quality Of Life Sustainable Transportation Travel
Resource Type:
Tech Report
Geographical Coverage:
Vermont
Corporate Publisher:
University of Vermont. Transportation Research Center
Abstract:
The term “livability” has been finding its way into policy discussions in the United

States steadily over the last decade. Organizations like the American Planning

Association (APA) and AARP have been concerned about livable neighborhoods and

communities in the United States for decades (Pollack, 2000; Bosselmann and

Macdonald, 1999), but the influence of livability on federal policy accelerated

rapidly in 2009 when USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood began to use the term

extensively including as a potential selection criteria in transportation projects

(LaHood, 2009). Some transportation professionals and communities hope that a

new selection process will replace travel -time reduction as the top priority dictated

by the 2005 Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act

(SAFETEA-LU), with a more multi-modal, multi-faceted measurement which

includes environmental protection, economic development, and community

improvement in general. It is possible that livability, and methods that measure it,

will be a fundamental part of the next surface transportation program. USDOT‟s

new initiatives dovetail with a new partnership with HUD and EPA, which seeks to

combine the agencies‟ resources to meet shared goals centered on the concept of

livability.

Livability is a concept that relates to many characteri stics of a community or

neighborhood, and lends itself to a multitude of planning and maintenance

considerations for physical infrastructure. As evidenced by the USDOT’s

attachment to the term, its relevance is critical in the planning and evaluation of

our transportation systems. A new attitude in the transportation community

regards transport systems as a “public good” and the users of those systems as

“consumers”. Under this framework, it becomes the responsibility of planners to

meet the market’s demand for mobility and access.

The research community tends to agree that livability may be defined differently for

different groups – urban and rural, young and old. While many different definitions

of livability exist, there is growing agreement that it is best defined by the users, or

“consumers”, of the system. This assumption makes it critical to understand what

users of our transportation system value, and then to develop methods that can

assimilate those values into measures of progress and success (Miller, 2010). In this

way, the concept of livability dictates the research methods needed to inform policy.


Format:
PDF
Funding:
UVM TRC report # 11-001
Collection(s):
US Transportation Collection
Main Document Checksum:
[+]
urn:sha256:0c7b6fa09a0fef0d4d08a84d8e10ecbf5154b57c9e64507f64bff9726a8ae7a2
Download URL:
https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/20584/dot_20584_DS1.pdf
File Type:

Supporting Files

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