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As federal and state policies place increasing emphasis on using comprehensive transportation performance measures to guide transportation decision making, there is a gap in such measures of transportation and land use systems. This seminar reports the results from a research project aiming to fill the gap in the type of applications and policy areas covered by existing measures. Modeled after the popular Consumer Price Index, the project refines and develops a transportation cost index (TCI) measure for transportation and land use systems by tracking the time and monetary costs of transportation for households as they travel to satisfy their daily needs. The TCI can be used in applications ranging from monitoring historical and projected trends (benchmarking), to evaluating and comparing scenarios outcomes (scenario evaluation), and it is capable of representing policy areas not sufficiently covered by existing similar measures.

The seminar will review similar performance measures, describe the rationale, design and implementation of TCI, and present results of its applications in Portland and Corvallis, Oregon, as well as nation-wide in the US.

The project is sponsored by National Institute of Transportation Communities (NITC) and Oregon DOT.

Liming Wang is an assistant professor in PSU's Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning. He teaches courses in Travel Demand Modeling, Transportation and Land Use, and Data Analysis Methods. His research takes a data-driven approach to address challenging issues in planning, in particular those intersecting land use and transportation. His recent research projects include data integration techniques for transportation and land use modeling, development and evaluation of comprehensive performance measures for transportation and land use systems, and regional strategic planning tools.