This report provides a method to define and measure the costs of personal immobility at a local level and contains a compendium of public transportation practices that address immobility, help reduce costs, and possibly provide economic benefits to both the riders and the larger community. The focus is on practices that assist people who need transportation to health care or who are transitioning from welfare to work. This report should be of interest to planners, decision makers, and social service and transportation providers. It should also serve as a resource to assist decision makers and transportation service providers in using their services more effectively to address the issue of personal immobility. The social effects of the post-World War II growth in automobile ownership and highway expansion have been studied extensively. During this period, many businesses and services relocated from transit-oriented cities to automobile-oriented locations, resulting in the migration of homes, employment, health care, education, shopping, and social services to the suburbs. Without a car, it is now difficult to fully participate in American society. However, the 1990 census indicates the approximately 9.2 percent of American households do not have access to a car, and many of these do not have access to good public transportation either. Young, elderly, and poor persons are primarily affected. This lack of personal mobility has an economic, social, and human cost, but the magnitude of these costs has not been well demonstrated. It is known that the costs include higher unemployment, lower tax revenues, higher welfare expenditures, greater medical costs, and limited human development opportunities. How much benefit would be generated by improving mobility for segments of society, and how can public transit play a stronger role? To answer these questions, there is a need to better define and measure the costs of immobility and to identify ways in which public transportation can help improve mobility. Crain & Associates, Inc., in association with Ricardo Byrd and Omniversed International, was the contractor for TCRP Project H-8 and prepared the final report. To achieve the project objective of developing a product that will assist transit and human services professionals in using their services more effectively to address the issue of immobility, the researchers conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on the economic, social, and human costs of immobility and the practices that assist in reducing these costs. Further, a method was developed to define and measure the economic, social, and human costs of immobility at the local level. Solicitations were made through articles in industry publications aimed at transit agencies, human-service agencies, and community-based organisations to identify the most current practices using public transportation. A summary of current practices is included; it highlights the institutional barriers that inhibit more effective use of available public transportation services and presents key findings on how these barriers can be overcome. In addition to the final report, this project produced in-depth documentation of 11 case studies conducted in six regions of the country. These case studies, which address welfare-to-work and access to health care, can be found on the TCRP home page (www4.nas.edu/trb/crp.nsf) on the Internet's World Wide Web as TCRP Web Document 7. (A)
Samenvatting