Transportation professionals need tools to collect and organize community data, including physical features of the natural and human environment as well as information on how communities value these features. Context tools can help practitioners think holistically, critically, and systematically about community context. With this in mind, the primary objective of this project was to provide an inventory of community context tools to transportation practitioners desiring to understand and incorporate community context variables into planning and project development processes.
This project included these four major tasks:
Solicitation of tools to help define community context
Collection of the tools submitted into a database
Review and synthesis of tools by focus group
Organization of tools by attributes of interest to practitioners and fact sheets presenting tools in an electronic searchable database
The project final report is posted at https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/docs/NCHRP25-25%2869%29_FR.pdf
As a result of the project, forty-one tools were collected and organized into an online database of resources that can be searched by attribute filters. This database is available at https://www.cte.ncsu.edu/CommunityContext/tools-search.asp
