Urban Transportation Criteria

When aligned with other services and facilities, transportation helps generate powerful forces for influencing the long-run real-estate market. Working to improve the pro ductivity and livability of urban areas, officials are increasingly looking to metropolitan policy studies for effective action and regulation programs. Thus, beyond immediate considerations of access and congestion, transportation decisions are now ex pected to reflect the impacts of governmental programs on gen eral urban development. The processes through which trans portation decisions are made are themselves being modified in recognition of the broad reverberations of transport policy. With a wider array of persons and governmental units con cerned with these decisions, the criteria applied to the alterna tive possibilities are becoming more comprehensive. Criteria applied depend not merely on personal outlook but also on the scope of responsibilities of the person weighing the alternatives. Two opposite tendencies are at work: a search for a reduction of criteria toward a single optimizing index accounting for all significant costs and benefits implicit in a proposed line of policy and program; conversely, a search better to identify and de scribe all the significant manifold repercussions of alternative proposals as these are viewed by different people.