Transportation Cost Index as a Performance Measure for Transportation and Land Use Systems: New Approaches and Applications

 METHODOLOGY We propose a Transportation Cost Index (TCI) performance measure for transportation and land use systems, inspired by the popular Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures changes in the price level of a market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households. In analogy to CPI, a TCI measures the cost of transportation for meeting daily needs. It can be: • A Comprehensive measure of transportation and land use systems; • Easy to interpret/understand; • Based on widely available data sources, possible to use it to monitor trends and project scenario outcomes; • Able to serve as an indicator for policy areas including transportation and land use system compatibility and balance. To build a TCI in the spirit of CPI to track transportation costs, it involves two steps: IMPLEMENTATIONS & APPLICATIONS Two current implementations utilize different data sources and are suitable for different use cases: • Survey-based Approach utilizes travel survey data to calculate travel costs for each trip and each household, and then aggregates trip-level and household-level costs by geography (e.g. TAZ, district), trip purpose and/or income group. • Cluster-based Approach first identifies activity centers in a study area with spatial clustering of activities and uses them as travel market baskets; the transportation costs are then computed for every geography (TAZ), trip purpose and income group as the costs of accessing the destinations in the travel market baskets.