Travel-Livability Index for Seniors, Phase I: Livability Attribute Importance

摘要

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 characteristics 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.