California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Assessments of transportation investment from a “social efficiency” viewpoint are absent from transportation policy analysis and marketing practice. This is mainly due to the lack of tools capable to assess the role of transportation infrastructure investment on the provision of activity opportunities to residents of each locality. In this report, we demonstrate a tool that identifies specific locations in an entire state where resource allocation has succeeded in maximizing benefits to the public. In addition, the tool and the Geographic Information System maps derived from this tool show which locations in California fail to be optimal and require their residents to travel excessively to pursue the same amount of activities when compared to other optimal locations around the state where travelling enables better time allocation. Efficiency is measured using stochastic frontier regression analysis and a wide variety of derived land use and transportation infrastructure indicators as inputs. The outputs examined are indices of location opportunities including retail, education, health, and manufacturing. The tool thus developed shows which demographic segments suffer the most from suboptimal time allocation and what type of investment is needed to alleviate this suffering. This new tool also shows the distribution of benefits of the transportation system and identifies differences in benefits across regions. In addition to the substantive findings about and mapping of the relative investment efficiency in California, this report presents a method to assess efficiency in a multi-objective environment.