Lead Presenter Biography

Henry McKay is a Sustainable Transportation Analyst working in the Director’s Office of Equity, Sustainability & Tribal Affairs at the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). He holds a Bachelor of Science in City and Regional Planning and a minor in Statistics from from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo. Henry has two years of experience working at the intersection of transportation planning, data analysis, and policy. His current work involves the development and implementation of multimodal access to destinations project performance metrics and equity-focused spatial analysis tools.

Ally de Alcuaz is a senior planner working in the Office of Transportation System Management at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT). Ally graduated from Santa Clara University with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies and from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with a Master of Urban and Regional Planning. Since joining MnDOT in 2020, Ally applies her interest in GIS and data-driven planning to her work through performance measurement and multimodal access analysis.

Anson F. Stewart, Project Lead for Analysis and Research at Conveyal LLC, works closely with transport professionals implementing innovative methods that center access to opportunities. He also collaborates with various public transport authorities as a Research Scientist at MIT, where he completed PhD and masters degrees and now serves as Deputy Director of the MIT JTL Urban Mobility/Transit Lab.

Co-Authors

Presentation Description

Building on decades of academic research, multiple city and state DOTs and MPOs are embedding accessibility measures in practice. User-friendly cloud-based software platforms have resolved many technical barriers and helped bring transportation planning practice to “the cusp of an accessibility era” (Handy, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2020.102319). These platforms allow users to customize indicators and recompute them for agile scenario exploration. These capabilities underscore the need for additional research into measures tailored for project selection, corridor and area planning, alternative development and selection, operations, and equity assessment. When ranking projects, how should planners weight access to different types of opportunities and by different modes? What are appropriate time cutoff or decay curves to use? How should combinations of projects be evaluated, especially when they may have synergistic benefits? How can potential opportunities to reconnect underserved or historically overburdened communities be highlighted?

We propose an interactive workshop to address these questions, centered on a tutorial and analysis competition. Our proposed workshop has five parts:

1. Panelists from two state DOTs (Caltrans and MnDOT) will summarize the work of a joint Technical Advisory Committee they convened. Over multiple meetings in late 2022, this committee met to develop guidance on transportation networks, analysis parameters, destination weighting, and project scoring use cases for accessibility measures.

2. The presenters will demonstrate cross-platform, open-source tools for calculating aggregate project scores from detailed accessibility results (e.g., https://github.com/hhmckay/Caltrans-Conveyal-Post-Processing-Tool/). The detailed results are outputs from open-source multi-modal routing software, run locally or through a cloud-based hosted service. Given time constraints, this tutorial will cover only downstream project scoring tools used to post-process these detailed results.

3. Organizers will provide participants with links to project scoring tools and a catalog of accessibility results prepared in advance for different example projects (e.g. high-resolution access to jobs and non-work destinations, with different time cutoff and decay curves, by different modes). Participants will work in teams to define specific indicators focused on accessibility and equity. Teams will then evaluate the example projects according to these indicators, using the provided aggregate project scoring tools.

4. Each team will present their selected indicators and the resulting project rankings. The organizers will reveal the scoring parameters decided upon by the Caltrans and MnDOT Committee, and token prizes will be awarded to the teams with the closest parameters.

5. The organizers will facilitate a concluding discussion, on consistency of project rankings given different scoring parameters, and future research questions raised by the exercise.

If needed, the interactive components of this workshop proposal could be removed to fit a podium session or lightning talk. 

Presentation File