NCHRP Report 419, Tourism Travel and Transportation System Development contains findings and recommendations for coordinating and integrating state transportation and tourism program decision making. The report includes evaluation of approaches for accommodating tourism travel, principles for integrating transportation and tourism objectives, guidelines for achieving interagency coordination in transportation planning, measures of tourism travel output and linkages with economic development, and approaches for improving traveler information.

Since the enactment of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 ISTEA there has been an increasing formalization of coordinated statewide tourism and transportation planning and policies. Primarily, this stems from the recognition that the relationship between the quality and operation of the transportation system and the growth of tourism travel must be understood and appreciated in order to guide statewide planning and transportation and investment decisions. States take different approaches to the promotion and facilitation of tourism travel and to the measurement of its effect on economic development. It is critical that an effective approach to the demonstration and measurement of the economic benefits of tourism be developed and that the states be provided with information and guidelines on how investments in transportation infrastructure and traveler facilities can increase these economic benefits.

NCHRP Report 419 reflects the results of research into the development of measurement techniques and common approaches for evaluating tourism-related highway transportation investment decisions; synthesis and evaluation of highway transportation strategies for promoting tourism; and recommendations for improvement to facilitate traveler use of the highway transportation system.

In addition to this report, the project produced an unpublished volume of supporting materials and references. Included in this volume are the survey instrument employed for data and information gathering, a statistical summary of the survey results; excerpts of various policy documents collected during the research; and a worksheet developed by the Oregon Tourism Division for evaluating the economic effects of transportation investments. This reference document can be found on the NCHRP homepage (www2.nas.edu/trbcrp) as NCHRP Web Document 18.