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Introduction and Purpose In 2009, the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (U.S. HUD) created the Partnership for Sustainable Communities (the Partnership) “to help improve access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment in communities nationwide” (U.S. EPA, 2009, para. 6). Guided by the goals of the Partnership, the federal government has committed significant resources and attention to implementing livability in state and local governments. While high-level, strategic federal investment in livability is relatively recent; states, regions, and localities have planned and implemented livable communities for more than a decade. For example, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities (Met Council) established their programs in 1995. As many of the…

Introduction We all remember being a child on what seemed like an end­less journey to grandma’s house or the Grand Canyon and asking “Are we there yet?” In America’s cities and towns, we are having one of those “Are we there yet?” moments — although it seems the GPS is malfunctioning and we have lost the ability to chart a course toward our future. What does “there” look like? How will we know when we are “there”? What are the critical investments we need to make in order to strengthen our regional economies and ensure that America remains globally competitive? What are the attributes of communities and regions that help the people who live and work there succeed? How can we ensure that every child – regardless of what zip code they are born into or the color of their skin — has access to opportunities to improve their lives and contribute to America’s prosperity? America is confronting serious issues in this second decade of the 21st century: The gap…

The topic of barrier-free access is of great importance in Dresden. Dresden has a population of over 508,000 inhabitants, more than 60,000 of whom have a disability. Demographic changes and an increase in the number of older people mean the number of people with disabilities continues to increase.

Introduction The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.
Stephen R. Covey As you turn the first page of this book, you ask yourself, “What’s in it for me? Am I spending my time or investing my time?” We live in an exciting time of great innovation and rapidly changing thinking about how to solve transportation problems. Since the early 1990s, hundreds of new organizations have formed to advocate for cyclists and pedestrians; curb sprawl and promote smarter solutions to growth; save scenic roads and promote heritage tourism; support local sustainable agriculture; bring back freight rail and promote light rail; and protect the environment by adopting new energy technologies and constructing resource efficient buildings. Curious people can tap into the web to access a vast universe of transportation information and case studies, and quickly communicate with friends and neighbors through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and many other sites and…

Carsharing in North America is changing the transportation landscape of metropolitan regions across the continent. Carsharing systems give members access to an automobile for short-term use. The shared cars are distributed across a network of locations within a metropolitan area. Members can access the vehicles at any time with a reservation and are charged by time or by mile. Carsharing thus provides some of the benefits of personal automobility without the costs of owning a private vehicle.

A central tenet of urban economics is that households, businesses, and industries compete for urban sites that enjoy accessibility advantages – whether to jobs, labor markets, raw materials, or distributions centers. Transportation investments trigger economic growth by enhancing accessibility, particularly in fast-growing, congested cities. Scholarly work suggests the impacts are more redistributive than generative – that is, new highways, rail investments, and busways shift growth that would have happened regardless from particular corridors and subareas of a region to others as opposed to prompting firm relocations and new business investments in a region. Factors other than transportation, such as “quality of life”, are increasingly influencing location choices of middle-income households and firms that are footloose. Of course, transportation and quality of life are not unrelated – public opinion polls reveal that being stuck in traffic is often first on the list among…

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S. and …notes that few, if any, growth relationships remain constant, including Gibrat's Law. Education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades, but does not seem to predict county growth a century ago. After reviewing this evidence, we present and estimate a simple model of regional change, where education increases the level of entrepreneurship. Human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labor demand. We …nd that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship, not with growth in quality of life, at least outside of theWest. We also …nd that skills seem to…

This Recommended Practice introduces guidelines for designing and operating sustainable transit that both reduces a community’s environmental footprint from transportation and enhances its quality of life by making travel more enjoyable, affordable and timely.