The primary goal of this project is to develop a tool to evaluate the costs and benefits of active transportation projects as a part of Caltrans Active Transportation Program (ATP) project evaluation. The researchers will build a tool for the specific purpose of ATP project comparison, but the tool will also allow cities and counties to compare projects within their specific jurisdictions. Given the challenges of quantifying all the benefits of the wide variety of active transportation projects, the researchers propose a simplified benefit and cost framework that provides an ability to compare competing projects across a range of benefits rather than explicitly quantifying every benefit in monetary terms for a given project. The research team proposes a framework for estimating active transportation project benefits based on empirical measures of behavior change. The researchers selected this approach because the theoretical link between behavior change and most active transportation project benefits, and because data is more readily available for measuring behavior change than downstream benefits.
