FUTURE OF STATEWIDE TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: WHAT CAN THE PROFESSIONALS DELIVER?

To be effective in todays environment, statewide transportation planning must reflect the facts that (a) comprehensiveness is not feasible, (b) long-range planning is often unrealistic, (c) large data-collection activities and model development efforts will be relevant only to a small portion of the issues, and (d) the professional style of the past-analysis oriented, aloof from the complexity of the organization and politicial environment, technically objective and value neutral-will not be an effective role. Planners should be becoming problem solvers and issues analysis providing timely information for the decision-making process. Most often, decisions will focus on one or more well-defined issues rather than on comprehensive strategies and long-range policy directions. What is needed are analysis techniques with different of comprehensiveness in the scale of analysis. In lieu of the traditional comprehensive statewide long-range plan, the concept of a multiyear program plan is introduced. A multiyear plan contains actions staged over several periods into the future, beginning with near-term immediately implementable actions in the first year or period of the plan and following with additional actions tenatively planned for the short-range (2-5 years), mid-range (5-15 year) and long-range (after 15 years.)