CRP 384
Neighborhood Transportation Planning

Instructor: Susan Handy
Unique Number: 01190
Time: MW 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Place: Sutton 2.114

The goal of this course is to introduce students to transportation planning issues and methods at the neighborhood level. Although many transportation problems are global in scale, including the depletion of fossil fuels and the global warming trend, or regional in scale, including congestion and air quality problems, many other important transportation issues are found at the neighborhood level. As automobile travel continues to grow, for example, traffic turns commercial streets into automobile-only zones and increasingly spills over onto residential streets, thus impacting the lives of neighborhood residents. Residents without access to a car - the poor, the young, the old, and the disabled - are especially impacted by these changes.This course will be of interest to any planning, architecture, and engineering students who are interested in transportation planning and/or neighborhood planning.

The course is divided into three sections. The first section will introduce basic concepts important to neighborhood transportation planning and will review planning and engineering practices that shape local transportation systems. The second section will explore a variety of strategies now being used to address transportation problems at the neighborhood level, including street design strategies, techniques for promoting neighborhood-scale businesses, and alternative technologies that may enhance accessibility while reducing negative impacts. The final section will present examples of interesting efforts in other communities that effectively combine strategies to address transportation problems.

Students will complete two homework assignments and one project. In the first assignment, students will identify a transportation problem in their neighborhood or elsewhere in Austin and develop a proposed solution to this problem. In the second assignment, students will complete a short Traffic Impact Study using the traffic analysis techniques covered in class. For the project, students, working in groups, will develop transportation studies for selected neighborhoods or selected problems in the Austin area. These studies will explore issues ranging from the impact of traffic on quality of life to alternatives for providing accessibility to needed jobs and services. Students will be graded based on the two homework assignments (40%), the final project, including both a written report and presentation of the plan (40%), and in-class participation (10%).