Best Practice Actions
- Engage local partners in order to understand their goals for transportation, and find opportunities to coordinate investments and leverage resources.
- Establish a program to monitor implementation and measure performance.
- Be willing to engage in discussions and negotiations that may challenge your assumption of effectiveness of current programs, regulatory practices and service delivery systems as a means to develop new programs and strategies for implementation.
- Set challenging, yet attainable targets within a reasonable time frame.
- Run alternative transportation scenarios.
- Run land and cost impacts based on scenarios.
- Establish new mode split targets for the target area correlated to jobs/housing targets.
- Identify barriers to goal achievement.
- Set disincentives for parking near the work site and implement designs for encouraging transit use.
- Commit long-term to the agreed-upon plan and establish accountability and progress measurement through a forum.
Benefits of Implementing Demand Management Strategies
An efficient transportation system supports economic development by saving time and money for people and businesses. Other benefits include:
- Reducing energy consumption and air pollution, while helping preserve and maintain the roadway network by lessening wear and tear from vehicle travel.
- Encouraging more people to take fewer motor vehicle trips. Having fewer drive-alone travelers on the roads reduces delay for all system users, which can make travel planning more reliable.
- Decreasing the number of collisions (see Safe Travels, Evaluating Mobility Management Traffic Safety Impacts for more details).
- Helping a community avoid the need to add infrastructure to support increasing numbers of automobile trips.
Connection to State Policy
- WSDOT Executive Order 1086.00 “Commute Trip Reduction Program”
- TDM links to GMA Planning Goals #3 Transportation, #10 Environment, and #12 Public facilities and services.
Web Resources
Whatcom County Smart Trips.
A partnership between local government, public agencies, employers, and schools to promote transportation by walking, bicycling, sharing rides, and riding the bus.
