Book Review: "Roadways for People" Seeks To Change Transportation Planning

Roadways for People, and author Lynn Peterson. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Anyone who has heard the Strong Towns directive to “observe humbly where people are struggling” will be on familiar turf in Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering. Like Strong Towns Founder Charles Marohn, author Lynn Peterson, currently the president of the Oregon Metro Council, calls herself a “recovering” transportation engineer, and, also like him, she was ambivalent about projects she had worked on early in her career and was determined to find a better way.

Peterson’s book (co-authored with Elizabeth Doerr) makes the case for human-centered design, with a more inclusive role for all affected stakeholders, including consulting them much earlier in the process and being cognizant of past planning wrongs when dealing with affected communities.

“While it is our job as transportation professionals to develop potential scenarios that meet technical needs and meet safety guidelines, we must continuously test our assumptions about what our work can represent with the community members who will be utilizing the spaces we help create,” writes Peterson.

Engineers are great at solving engineering problems, Peterson argues, but too often the goals delivered to them omit critical context and community needs. On many road projects,  “community engagement” has just been a box to check for the planning process, with superficial meetings that document residents’ concerns but rarely act on them. Compounding the problem, numerous entities and departments may work on any given transportation project, making communication, aligning goals, and even ethics more challenging. 

Many projects that prove to be harmful were designed to solve one problem (e.g., traffic throughput) while ignoring other adverse effects. Peterson talks about the problem of defining goals, and how engineering speak can obscure real needs or effects. This results in goals for a project such as, “Reduce congestion on mainline highway at interchange X by adding a lane to the northbound off-ramp and improve signals at intersections of the interchange with the local arterial to decrease delay for $25 million.” Run that through a more effective community engagement process, and it might come out with more clearly defined directives, such as “decrease congestion in the northbound direction on the main line during the peak hour,” “increase mobility and accessibility to the surface streets,” and “improve pedestrian and cyclist safety through the interchange area on the surface streets with an emphasis on seniors’ needs.” 

Peterson outlines several mechanisms to capture concerns earlier and more earnestly. She proposes a four-stage process with feedback loops for each phase to prevent erroneous or misplaced directives from advancing to implementation. She starts with “Create Problem Statement,” in which teams listen carefully and test assumptions, then “Re-scope and Test,” which scrutinizes those problem statements. In “Plan and Test,” scenarios and metrics are evaluated, then where design and metrics are finalized in “Design and Test.” Only after these steps, each with an escape hatch to recalibrate, does a project go to implementation. 

Peterson cites some success stories born from a more inclusive process. In Eagle County, Colorado, transportation officials preside over a car-dependent landscape with many high-income homeowners. But much of the workforce at the area’s popular ski resorts lives below the poverty line and needs reliable public transportation to reach their jobs and local services.

Coordinating with as many as 24 local agencies, the county developed an app called Transit Hub, which compiled local public transportation routes and schedules from multiple providers in an easy-to-use and translatable format. They also worked with local ski areas to incorporate schedules of the employee shuttles they run, and even coordinated with local medical centers and agencies to develop a mobile medical bus to serve underprivileged residents. This inclusive process went far beyond what many transportation departments would consider their purview, and produced results that benefitted a wider range of local residents in a cost-effective way.

In another example, a rail tunnel project in Baltimore, planners realized the original goal came from Amtrak to reduce travel times for its trains in the Northeast Corridor. The repair was not optional—the tunnel had reached the end of its functional life—but the planners and engineers sought a much deeper level of community engagement for a project that would be so disruptive to the affected areas. In the end, they came up with a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that detailed how the neighborhood’s needs would be accounted for in the project, with details for specific mitigation efforts and neighborhood improvements. 

Peterson’s recent career has included working on the controversial Rose Quarter Improvement Project in Portland, Oregon. The construction of Interstate 5 in Oregon was one of several downtown highways constructed through a historically Black neighborhood in the 20th century. Transportation officials are now grappling with how to make transportation improvements in the city, while also mitigating and rectifying the historic harms inflicted by the creation of the highway. Peterson writes compellingly of the responsibilities of planners and engineers on this issue, which Strong Towns has covered with recent civil rights challenges to highway projects in Houston and Cincinnati. 

Roadways for People offers an important reminder of a phrase commonly bandied about in government and planning circles: “communities aren’t places, they are people.”

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