Statewide Multimodal Planning: Current Practice at State Departments of Transportation

This paper summarizes the results of a national survey of state departments of transportation (DOTs) focusing on the extent to which they emphasized multimodal solutions in transportation planning. The results offer insights into the size, the scope, and the progress in multimodal planning that states have been making since the passage of the Inter-modal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. The online survey instrument was distributed to all 50 state DOTs; 35 responses were collected. Some key challenges that apparently limited the adoption of multimodal planning approaches in earlier decades are still considered challenges today. The current snapshot of multimodal planning suggests that most state transportation agencies still do not use evaluation criteria to compare multiple modal options. Not surprisingly, constraints and limitations on project eligibility because of funding source restrictions were identified as the major limitation to advances in multimodal planning and program development, followed by the need to follow agency standard operating procedures and by an agency's history and culture of highway-dominated planning. However, changes were clearly taking place. It is a positive sign that many state officials (20 out of 35) concluded that real progress had been made in furthering multimodal planning objectives during the past 10 years.