Comparing the Progress of Cities in Providing Alternatives to the Car Commute

Adele Peters shares news of a new report and online tool from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy that measures how well cities connect residents to their jobs through public transit, walking, or biking.

The "Indicators for Sustainable Mobility," as the tool is called, "considered 12 different factors, including how close homes and jobs are to rapid transit, how many people have access to transit that runs frequently at rush hour, the size of city blocks, and how many people could get to work in a half an hour or an hour by walking, biking on protected bike lanes, or on public transit," according to Peters.

Peters uses the comparative power of the tool to compare the transit access successes of the city of Minneapolis, for instance, to cities with a lot more work to do, like Nashville and Indianapolis.

Andrew Small also picked up on the news of the new tool from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and focused on the lessons cities could apply when deciding how to improve access to alternative transportation.

"The key, the reports stresses, is getting a better balance between jobs, low-income households, and people in proximity to public transit," writes Small.