In the Boulder Transportation Master Plan (TMP), our Boulder City Council and planners have established goals intended to guide us toward “the desired transportation system” for the city. To track our progress, the plan presents nine measurable objectives: (1) reduce total vehicle miles of travel in the Boulder Valley; (2) reduce single occupant vehicle travel; (3) reduce greenhouse gas emissions; (4) avoid worsening congestion; (5) provide transportation options that benefit the whole range of our diverse population; (6) provide transportation options in new employment centers; (7) improve transportation safety; (8) improve neighborhood access to grocery stores, parks, restaurants, and transit stops; and (9) reduce vehicle miles of travel per individual.

Objectives 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9 have to do with improving the environment, while 4, 5, and 7 highlight specific concerns. Number 8 envisions future reconfigured neighborhoods, rather than immediate changes in transportation. To summarize, the measurable objectives established by our City Council and transportation planners have to do with the environment, congestion, social justice, and safety.

Importantly, however, transportation users have a different focus. Their primary interests, according to an article by the National League of Cities Center for Research and Innovation (Moore et al., n.d., p. 7), are: comfort, reliability, speed, convenience, out-of-pocket costs, and safety. Aside from safety, there is very little overlap between the criteria the city planners feel are important enough to measure and the criteria of concern to transportation users.

Because users and planners use different criteria to evaluate travel modes, it is not surprising that the two groups often end up preferring different modes of transportation. We saw this conflict break into the open during the “right-sizing” brouhaha on Folsom Street when planners attempted to facilitate bicycle travel at the expense, citizens bitterly complained, of automobiles. And we see this scenario playing out over east Arapahoe Street’s provision of restricted travel lanes for buses while automobile drivers protest that there are already too few lanes for existing traffic.

To clarify for myself how these different sets of criteria affect preferences for transportation modes, I constructed spreadsheets with possible travel modes (e.g., bicycles and buses) across the tops and criteria down the left sides. One spreadsheet lists transportation users’ criteria and the other lists planners’ criteria. I filled the cells with values ranging from 5, when it seems to me that a travel mode fulfills a criterion closely, down to 1, when it seems that a travel mode fulfills a criterion poorly or not at all. Finally, I averaged the scores for each travel mode and ranked them from best (the mode that best met the evaluation criteria) to worst.

If you do this exercise yourself, I predict that you will arrive at similar, but different, rankings. The numbers we put in the cells, after all, reflect our personal knowledge, experience, physical abilities—probably even our politics. They are value judgments and I cannot conceive of a master spreadsheet that could determine incontrovertibly which transportation mode is best. With that disclaimer, here are the results I obtained.

Ranking with transportation users’ criteria: (1) personal rapid transit, (2) self-driving car, (3) self-driving taxi, (4) auto, (5) gondola, (6) walking, (7 tie) bicycling, and (7 tie) bus.

Ranking with transportation planners’ criteria: (1) walking, (2) personal rapid transit, (3) bicycling, (4) gondola, (5) self-driving car, (6 tie) self-driving taxi, (6 tie) bus, and (8) auto.

On one hand, these rankings suggest that users’ criteria are well met by automobiles (self-driving or not). On the other hand, planners’ criteria are better met by walking and bicycling. Interestingly, buses do not match either users’ or planners’ criteria very well.

The differences in the rankings underscore the need to include users’ criteria in the TMP alongside the already included planners’ criteria. We can properly evaluate potential transportation modes only by considering all the criteria that need optimization. By specifying nine measurable objectives in the TMP the city has recognized that good decisions depend on good measurements. That is a commendable start, but the next iteration of the plan needs to include objectives that reflect the needs and wants of the users themselves. We can have a transportation system that works for both administrators and individuals but to get to that point we first need a TMP with a clear-headed articulation of all the criteria that system must meet.

Continue to Part 2