Transportation plans consider the regional attributes and impacts of transportation alternatives and choices on air quality and other factors affecting quality of life. Many transportation plans address key smart growth characteristics such as connectivity, accessibility, mobility and multi-modal travel options. A brief description of these characteristics follows.
Connectivity – between cities, communities, activity centers, urban regions and neighborhoods – is what makes an area both accessible and mobile. Connectivity is also necessary for economic success and good quality of life, but must be compatible with other local and system-wide objectives. The interdependence of urban, rural and regional economies and personal mobility require connections between urbanized areas, smaller communities and other areas of activity.
Accessibility describes the ease with which people can reach their destinations. A regional transit system operates most efficiently when development is concentrated at major hubs or is located along existing major corridors. This allows for an efficient transportation system with high accessibility that makes maximum use of existing infrastructure and builds new major transportation corridors only where there is no alternative.
Mobility is the freedom or ease of movement that people experience when traveling from place to place. Mobility is enhanced by efficient transportation systems that provide flexibility in choices of travel modes to get people where they want to go at a reasonable cost in time and money. A transportation system needs multi-modal transportation and/or alternative routes to reach destinations to provide the greatest levels of mobility.
Ease of travel, convenience and travel time are considerations in mobility. These are affected by the system’s level-of-service, which is affected by the system’s capacity and efficiency. When demand exceeds capacity, level-of-service declines, travel times increase and mobility is impaired. This impaired private vehicle mobility may result in shifts to less congested and more convenient modes, such as transit, that may operate at a lower overall cost to the user. For this reason, consideration of all modes is important in the concept of mobility. In certain settings (a downtown setting is the most common), it is not practical to provide free-flow travel on all of a city’s roadways. To retain adequate mobility, transit service with more efficient carrying capacity is needed to maximize the mobility function of the overall transportation system.
Source: Excerpt from Smart Growth Transportation Guidelines: An ITE Proposed Recommended Practice pp. 24-25
Published: 2003
