Mobility for Healthy Communities: the State of Transportation Planning 2020 Report

This post is part of our comprehensive look at how COVID-19 is reshaping the mobility landscape.  For more original research, project work, and thought leadership from the Sam Schwartz team, visit the COVID-19 Response + Analysis center.

By Mark Bennett, Planner/Urban Designer

Every two years, the American Planning Association publishes the State of Transportation Planning, providing a platform for transportation planners, researchers and advocates to highlight innovative ideas, emerging research, current issues and success stories.

The 2020 report, which I was honored to co-edit with Los Angeles-based planner Cat Callaghan, was released at the end of April and is proving to be unexpectedly timely amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Going into the project, the loudest narratives in transportation seemed to be all about technology. New gadgets, software, AI and apps were driving a revolution in transportation and mobility, or so we were told. And the American transportation narrative has long been almost exclusively car-centric, even though we’ve been gathering mounting piles of evidence that it’s time to evolve away from such an obsession with the automobile.

So instead, the report’s talented staff of volunteer editors and designers came together and agreed what we needed most was a conversation about moving people over cars, and it was time to center transportation planning on narratives of community, justice and health. And so, we put out a call to transportation planners across the country asking them to redefine the next era of people-focused and health-focused transportation planning.

We certainly never expected to release a health-centered transportation report in the middle of a global pandemic. But what this crisis has revealed more clearly than ever is that a transportation planning approach focused on health, on justice and on people is what we have most urgently needed for a long time now. 

Health is personal, it’s community-wide and it’s global. A health-centered approach examines both how systems can harm and improve health. For the report, we also asked planners to consider issues of equity, advocacy, climate change, land use, goods movement and, yes, emerging technology.

“Moving People Over Cars: Mobility for Healthy Communities” was the charge we sent out the transportation planning community, and we found we were far from the only ones looking for a different conversation. We ended up receiving far more article submissions than I expected.

I’m proud that among the submissions were two extremely insightful articles from Sam Schwartz planners. John Reinhardt and Dorottya Miketa collaborated on an article exploring transit-priority street designs and benefits in Toronto, New York and San Francisco, while Sarah Powers authored a guide for incorporating health data into transportation planning.

The more than 60 authors who contributed to the 35 articles in this report have created a framework for how we move forward as transportation planners in a world that is more vulnerable than ever. Last year’s promised technologies and gadgets seem shallow now. They will not save our communities in this moment. Instead, we need to turn urgently toward a people-centered, health-centered, justice-centered approach to create systems that provide strong, healthy, and equitable mobility for all. 

“Mobility for All” is the first chapter in the report, and it embodies the hope we have going forward as transportation planners. When we asked planners to share their visions for the state of transportation planning, we found that there is, in fact, a revolution happening. But what you’ll read in this report is not a revolution fueled by technology or hype, but a people-first, health-focused, equity-centered, climate-conscious revolution.

This is the state of transportation planning in 2020.

Want more vital transportation stories? Subscribe to TransCentral today.