United States Department of Transportation
i
A travel - livability index for seniors, phase I : livability attribute importance.
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2011-05-12
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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.
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