First Principles in Transportation Law and Policy
Book chapter in A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR US LAND USE AND PLANNING LAW (John Infranca & Sarah Schindler eds., 2023)
16 Pages Posted: 4 Jan 2023 Last revised: 7 Mar 2024
Date Written: January 2, 2023
Abstract
The main purpose of transportation is connecting people to destinations they value. This seemingly banal statement would, if taken seriously in policymaking, upend transportation and land use planning.
Today, planning agencies rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure outcomes. While ostensibly neutral and technical, these measurements in fact imply policy judgments and drive legal consequences. They operate both as a shield against litigation and as a sword to justify new projects. But the way KPIs are set up reflects confusion about basic purposes. They are used to plan and evaluate based not on the ability to reach anything but rather simply to accelerate the speed of traveling.
We seek to anchor transportation policy discussion in first principles. The shift we propose is mode agnostic in that it is relevant to all means of transportation. Even so, shifting from a goal of speed to one of reachability would be a leap. We believe such a shift suggests important open questions regarding the barriers to reform and we engage a few of them.
Note:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Keywords: transportation, planning, land use, state and local government law, key performance indicator, KPI, traffic engineering, land use transportation interaction, LUTI, environmental review, CEQA, mobility, accessibility
JEL Classification: K23, K34, R14, R15, R41, R42,
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation