HighLight Heading
June 2001
System complexity, personal choice requiring new approaches
Sheldon Edner
The conference luncheon presentation featured Dr. Sheldon Edner of the Federal Highway Administration's Metropolitan Planning and Programs division, speaking on "Transportation Decision-making: Why New Approaches are Necessary."
Continuing the morning's theme of ramp metering, Ednerstated his belief that the political and administrative processes seen in the ramp metering debate represent the future of transportation decision-making. The transportation system, Edner said, has for the most part completed its developmental phase, and the focus is currently shifting from development to managing and optimizing the system—for example, providing users with a small but reliable reduction in commute times.
Users of the transportation system today are not following a single path from point A to point B. Instead, there is tremendous variability in localized transportation needs, as people make complex demands on the transportation system. In this environment, there is a growing need to develop transportation facilities that link small trips, as opposed to long-distance "linear" systems.
As a result, Edner said, transportation planners have begun to look beyond the individual transportation project to see how the overall transportation system of an area ties into community development, creating an intermodal transportation system that functions in a global context.
Central to Edner's view of the future of transportation decision-making is the concept of "environmental justice"—ensuring that the planning process does not result in unfair impacts on any community of users. This is a complex task, because transportation projects must serve more diverse communities and work to enhance existing facilities.
In this increasingly complex environment of a metropolitan transportation system, Edner continued, the issue of personal choice is assuming greater importance for users—a fact highlighted by the current debate about ramp metering. One of the most alluring promises of intelligent transportation systems (ITS)—centralized real-time traffic management—may be viewed as an infringement on personal choice by a public accustomed to the idea of unmanaged individual travel, even if the end result of centralized management is better overall performance, he said.
The question of implementing advanced traffic management systems highlights the need to develop performance measures for transportation system improvements. As in the case of ramp metering, a performance measure such as reduced average trip time may not be as significant to users as it is to planners, given the presence of other factors like wait time in ramp meter queues, Edner concluded.