Transportation Cost Index: A Comprehensive Multimodal Performance Measure of Transportation and Land Use Systems

Recent federal and state laws in the U.S. are placing increasing emphasis on using comprehensive transportation performance measures to guide transportation planning and programming. Although there is a growing list of performance measures of land use and transportation systems largely centered on accessibility, one of the challenges in successfully implementing performance measures in the transportation planning process is the development of measures that present an overall picture of both transportation and land use systems and are relatively easy to interpret for policy makers and the public. There are also certain policy goals, such as the aspect of a balanced transportation system mandated by the state of Oregon’s transportation planning rules, are not well reflected by popular accessibility measures. In response to this demand, Reiff and Gregor (2005) proposed a Transportation Cost Index (TCI) to fill this gap. Building on the concept of the widely-used Consumer Price Index (CPI), the TCI aims to be an accessibility measure that reflects the policy areas including a balanced transportation system, environmental justice, and land use compatibility. This paper reviews the TCI measure and the method for computing the measure and demonstrates it with a proof-of-concept application in Portland, Oregon. The authors further describe the efforts of an ongoing research project aiming to advance the TCI from the proof-of-concept stage to implementation at the state, metropolitan planning organization (MPO), and community levels