BACKGROUND

As transportation agencies strive to deliver community-centered transportation, practitioners must have reliable data, analytical tools, partners, and resources. Data enables transportation professionals and decision-makers to better understand the diversity of the communities they serve by illustrating community characteristics and needs, and highlights trends that inform transportation planning. Data inputs can include a variety of categories, such as demographic and socioeconomic. Data availability exists on multiple spectra: public to private, primary to tertiary, and freely available to purchased.

Developments in data and analytical techniques are fast evolving and could support transportation agencies in identifying (1) the visions and goals of their communities quantitatively or qualitatively and (2) disparities in access to the transportation that enables community success. As technology increases the number of data sources, there is a corresponding increase in the complexity, clarity, and questions about the fidelity of data for transportation agencies to consider as inputs. Additionally, safeguarding individual privacy and ensuring ethical use of data are paramount as this field develops. 

However, there are knowledge, capacity, and practice gaps in using data to understand communities. Challenges may include data accuracy, assumptions in analyses, accessibility of data, and identifying logical pairings between sources and uses of the data. Research is needed to better understand data opportunities and confront the challenges transportation agencies experience to enable planning for community-centered transportation. 

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research is to develop a guide and data framework to empower transportation agencies to deliver community-centered transportation.

Accomplishment of the project objective will require at least the following tasks.