TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 710: Practical Approaches for Involving Traditionally Underserved Populations in Transportation Decisionmaking highlights tools, techniques, and approaches for identifying and connecting with populations that have traditionally been underserved and underrepresented in transportation decisionmaking.

This guide was written as a quick primer for transportation professionals and analysts who assess the impacts of proposed transportation actions on communities. It outlines the community impact assessment process, highlights critical areas that must be examined, identifies basic tools and information sources, and stimulates the thought-process related to individual projects. In the past, the consequences of transportation investments on communities have often been ignored or introduced near the end of a planning process, reducing them to reactive considerations at best. The goals of this primer are to increase awareness of the effects of transportation actions on the human environment and emphasize that community impacts deserve serious attention in project planning and development-attention comparable to that given the natural environment. Finally, this guide is intended to provide some tips for facilitating public involvement in the decision making process.

The lack of access to transportation among low-income groups is increasingly being recognised as a barrier to employment and social inclusion both in Britain and the United States. This work looks at the delivery of transport from a social policy perspective to assist in a better understanding of this issue.

The research for this study began with Phase 1. Various Phase 1 recommendations were forwarded into a second phase of environmental justice (EJ) research to provide additional tools for enhancing Colorado's statewide and regional transportation planning process. The study began with a phone survey of Colorado community leaders and representatives. The surveys were conducted to gather input on processes currently used by community leaders for their public outreach. The next step was to update low-income and minority mapping with recently released 2000 Census data. Having identified where the low-income households and minority populations reside in the State, a summary of public involvement techniques and tools was prepared to accompany the census mapping. Since a key component of long-range planning is the ability to measure the distribution of benefits from transportation plans, techniques to measure the benefits of transportation investments and enhanced public involvement were researched.

In this new fifth edition, there is a strong focus on the increasing concern over infrastructure resilience from the threat of serious storms, human activity, and population growth. The new edition also looks technologies that urban transportation planners are increasingly focused on, such as vehicle to vehicle communications and driver-less cars, which have the potential to radically improve transportation. This book also investigates the effects of transportation on the health of travelers and the general public, and the ways in which these concerns have become additional factors in the transportation and infrastructure planning and policy process. The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past half-century illustrates the changing relationships among federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to today’s concerns over sustainable development, security, and pollution control. Highlighting major national events, the book examines the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. The volume provides in-depth coverage of the most significant event in transportation planning, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which created a federal mandate for a comprehensive urban transportation planning process, carried out cooperatively by states and local governments with federal funding. Claiming that urban transportation planning is more sophisticated, costly, and complex than its highway and transit planning predecessors, the book demonstrates how urban transportation planning evolved in response to changes in such factors as the environment, energy, development patterns, intergovernmental coordination, and federal transit programs. This new edition includes analyses of the growing threats to infrastructure, new projects in infrastructure resilience, the promise of new technologies to improve urban transportation, and the recent shifts in U.S. transportation policy. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in transportation legislation and policy, eco-justice, and regional and urban planning.