Inclusion and Equity at the 2022 APA National Conference

Renaissance is thrilled to have strong representation at this year’s National Planning Conference (NPC) for the American Planning Association (APA). Staff members Kate Ange, Caroline Dwyer, AICP, Alex Bell, and Kohl Malo, AICP will be participating in person and virtually.

Renaissance conducted a Healthy People, Healthy places workshop in Nogales, AX at the US-Mexico border.

An image from the last in-person NPC in 2019. We presented on EPA’s Healthy Places for Healthy People with community participants from Monett, MO; Wenatchee, WA; and Montgomery-Smithers, WV.

On April 30, Project Manager Caroline Dwyer, AICP and President Kate Ange will participate in a session for the conference in San Diego, California. Their session, Crossing the Line: Womxn, Planning, and Border Cities, uses Tijuana (located just south of San Diego) as a case study for the social, economic, political, and environmental challenges faced by women living in border cities. Caroline and Kate draw from previous experience working nationwide on engagement with a focus on women’s issues related to walkability, livability, and community revitalization. Other panelists will dive into the systemic issues contributing to the sex trafficking, economic exploitation, and gendered violence in border cities. Combined, these perspectives help reinforce solidarity in continuing to develop a strong equity lens in planning.

Additionally, Kohl Malo, AICP – who serves APA as the Board’s Student Representatives Council Chair – is working with the APA Students Council on three in-person events for students and emerging planners: a mentor match event, an emerging planner social, and a student session for learning what students need in a rapidly evolving world. Students and emerging planners can stay up to date on these events via the APA young professionals LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8262811/.

Finally, to accommodate those who cannot travel to the in-person conference, APA is offering a robust virtual program featuring exciting speakers and unique, future-oriented sessions. For the May 19 session Trail Blazing a ‘Path to Equity’ session, Alex Bell will discuss how multimodal accessibility analysis can provide a reliable framework for defining and addressing equity needs highlighting work he has been leading in Richmond, Virginia.  

Register for Caroline, Kate, and Alex’s conference events here: https://planning.org/conference/

Renaissance and APA: Reflections on a Changing Profession

Renaissance believes it is imperative for our staff to be involved in outside professional organizations – to stay abreast of industry-leading issues and increase the depth of our practice and expertise. Our staff’s professional affiliations span the American Institute of Certified Planners, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the American Planning Association, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Kohl Malo, AICP

Kohl Malo, AICP, is a Renaissance Planner active in the planning community. For nearly two years, he has served as a Representative for the Student Representatives Council of the American Planning Association (APA). This past fall, Kohl was elected as Chair of the Students Representatives Council (SRC). In this capacity, he guides the regional representatives on the SRC to advocate for students, highlight the work of new planners, and level the playing field to create a more diverse future for planning.

Speaking on his new Council Chair role, Kohl explains, “The SRC as a few strategic initiatives I hope to see cross the finish line. One is to centralize all the great content produced for students into one online hub. We’re also planning better engagements with students of color, one example being a pilot for a central hub for resources dedicated to planning students of color. One of the main functions of the SRC is to inspire on-campus student groups to better engage with their student bodies and their respective communities. To that point, we’re producing better materials for on-campus leaders and holding leadership events with nationally recognized speakers.”

As part of his new role, Kohl recently attended the APA Board of Directors meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting prompted Kohl to reflect on the future of planning – and Renaissance’s role in shaping and advancing the profession. Enjoy Kohl’s astute, thoughtful insights below!

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE PLANNING WORLD

– by Kohl Malo, AICP

 The world feels more chaotic than ever. The planning industry needs to grapple with several moving targets – climate change, virtual connectivity, equity – for us to create effective plans for communities in the future. Within this tumult, though, we can give rise to new opportunities to create more livable, vibrant, and diverse places for all.

At the Board of Directors Meeting, I learned about APA’s identification of upcoming themes of utmost importance and urgency to planners. Along with Lincoln Land Institute, APA developed the 2022 Trend Report for Planners, a remarkable toolkit for planners to understand “what’s trending” in the world. The report discusses over 100 dynamics likely to come into play in the planning professions. The document is freely accessible online.

Renaissance’s Relationship to Emerging Planning Trends

I was struck by how well-positioned Renaissance is to tackle some of the emerging trends flagged by APA. For instance:

Healthy Fair for the EPA Healthy Places, Healthy People Program

1. Local Food Systems Planning is highlighted in the report, with COVID-19 supply chain disruptions intensifying the dire needs for food security at a local level. Renaissance has worked with the EPA to develop the Local Foods, Local Places and later the Healthy Places for Healthy People program to increase community resiliency and food security with “quick hit” strategic plans that maximize return on community investment.

2. Decarbonization of Transportation is an entire chapter in the foresight report, as transportation remains the single-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Renaissance leads the area of multimodal, accessibility-based planning techniques and strategies with projects like the data-driven Transit-Oriented Communities Tool, the design-focused Lowcountry Bus Rapid Transit Plan, and multifaceted plans for FDOT’s Planning Studio that address safer cycling and pedestrian paths, better freight operations, and corridor visioning that create greater accessibility in areas that have already been developed. We believe that our trademark integration of transportation and land use is the only true way to decarbonize the transportation sector.

Transit Oriented Communities Tool, Miami-Dade Transportation Planning Organization

3. Technological Innovations, particularly in transportation, are called out in the report as one of the places the planning profession has the least preparedness for in the future. But Renaissance is ahead of the curve, having developed a wide and deep skillset modeling innovative transportation systems for our clients. Renaissance Technical Director Alex Bell’s recent post on innovation in transportation analysis and trends illustrates our analytical and methodological competencies.

4. Green Buildings and Construction is cited in the report as one of the largest opportunities to reduce energy needs and greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, green building codes, new requirements for water efficiency, and densification have highlighted the need for efficient buildings and neighborhoods. While Renaissance is a planning-focused firm, our new team members are experienced in the green construction process – and their expertise will build depth into our urban design practice in turn. Kathy Galvin, FAIA a renowned architect, has decades of experience creating sustainable development. Jonathan Moore, AIA, NCARB another new hire, has nearly two decades of architectural-planning experience. Both Jonathan and I hold a Leadership in Environmental Design (LEED) credential that certifies building projects as environmentally conscious.  

5. Economic Restructuring, precipitated by COVID, is intensifying the amount of commerce happening online. These changes are resulting in significant disruption for small business, retail work, and the service economy. Renaissance has been thinking about and responding to the national and local trends of COVID-19. Principal Dan Hardy recently presented on the subject for the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and Renaissance recently completed a COVID-19 economic adaption plan for small businesses in a historically auto-oriented section of Delaware.

A Human Scale

The 2022 Trend Report closes on the note that planning must have human skills. We must understand the complexity and singularity of every community in which we serve. Listening to and building trust with the public is essential to laying the foundation for more inclusionary, sustainable, and socially and economically viable places. With our extensive public engagement planning experience, Renaissance brings together planners, architects, engineers, and communicators to shape the best plans that respond to local needs and global trends.

 While it might not be the sufficient condition, it is always necessary for planners to consider and try to grapple with the multiple emergent systems that plug into a “city that works.” Renaissance will continue our involvement and shaping of the planning profession.  We are committed to use our range of expertise to keep up with the constantly changing world.

Planning and the Art of the Analytical Process

In celebration of APA’s Planning Month, Project Manager and Senior Technical Advisor Alex Bell reflects on the Accessibility-Based Travel Model & West Station Area Pilot Study project.

When asked what I do for a living, I often fumble for words. I try to explain that I’m an urban planner who knows little about conventional  planning (thankfully my colleagues know a ton about it!). But I’m really an urban analyst striving to use quantitative insights – generated through data analysis and custom tools – to deliver a sense of clarity for my peers, partners, and clients.

My contribution to planning arises from the development of novel analytical frameworks and the demonstration of fresh metrics to offer richer insight into the performance of and interactions among the complex systems that are frequently the subjects of plans and studies. After all, if we want to create and live in cities that work, we need to understand how they work.

In my role as an analyst, I often generate materials that support project stories, but my work isn’t really the story itself. In fact, the analytical process is often deemed too technical or inaccessible to belong within a larger project narrative. When projects are almost exclusively technical in nature, there’s a temptation to overemphasize innovation, novelty, and discovery. These tendencies obscure the art and craft of the analytical process – and the expertise and human motivations of the analysts designing and executing it.

The Accessibility-Based Travel Model & West Station Area Pilot Study Project

The Accessibility-Based Travel Model & West Station Area Pilot Study project illustrates Renaissance’s evolving analysis frameworks that reflect shifting priorities within the planning profession. This evolution always reflects our best efforts to get to grips analytically with the trending issues that resonate with planners and the communities they serve. Our introduced innovations need not impose themselves as a new way of doing things, but they can reframe prevailing thinking on  key topics to better address changing questions and concerns.

In 2019, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) of Massachusetts set out to develop a sketch travel planning model based on multimodal accessibility, an emerging analytical lens that combines land use and transportation factors to describe the ease with which travelers can reach destinations by different travel modes. Renaissance was retained to lead the study, and I took the reins as Project Manager. The goal was to offer planners an alternative to the regional travel demand model for local area analyses that would be sensitive to fine-grained demographic, land use, urban design, and transportation network and policy details.

It’s worth pausing to remind ourselves how difficult it is to understand how these aspects of place influence travel behaviors. Intuitively, we reckon they affect trip generation, mode choice, average trip length, etc. But tying them together in a comprehensive behavioral model? Let’s just acknowledge that no one on earth has perfected that yet.

Of course, perfection isn’t demanded. Sound, reasonable insight that can inform policy decisions is deeply valuable even when imperfect, especially in complex settings where numerous interests are represented. Our sketch travel model was to be pilot tested in the West Station planning area. Sticking strictly to the technical aspects of model development, Renaissance’s intention was to demonstrate sensitivity to alternative land use scenarios, walk and bike network configurations, transit service schedules, and pricing considerations in travel behavior forecasts. This would give planners critical insights to guide discussions with policymakers and stakeholders.

Our approach built on some of our prior experience using multimodal accessibility measurement and comparing the ease with which travelers could reach key destinations by walking, biking, driving, and transit. Accessibility offers several attractive features for this kind of sketch modeling application.

1. It’s pretty intuitive: the access offered by each mode relative to competing modes has a significant influence on whether travelers opt to use it. 

2. It can incorporate a lot of other variables: access scores generally reflect proximity to destinations and mobility provided over travel networks. In this way, it combines land use and transportation factors in a coherent framework. It can be sensitive to travel time, parking charges, transit fares, tolls, vehicle operating costs, network connectivity, non-motorized facility characteristics, land use mix, and more.

3. We can flex geographies: when we want to understand how highly localized changes like walking directness or land use mix influence travel patterns, we need a granular analysis. Since it can be measured at various scales, accessibility offers the opportunity to achieve that detailed granularity for a local study area, all the while retaining an awareness of regional travel patterns.

The modeling approach and results are summarized here. We developed rich accessibility scores for each major mode of travel that accounted for its unique operating characteristics and costs, providing granular detail in the West Station area while maintaining a regional perspective. The access scores were used to develop behavioral models that also account for traveler socio-economic and demographic characteristics to forecast trip generation, mode choice, and distribution patterns. We also created a post-processing step to estimate where trips by transportation network companies (TNC’s) like Uber and Lyft would be made.

Finally, we constructed the model in a relatively lightweight package for sharing and reuse. We programmed the entire modeling framework using Python and R, well-known data analysis languages. We delivered the full toolkit and workflow for MAPC staff to use in developing and testing alternative scenarios for the West Station area and for use in similar future efforts.

What It Means

Renaissance collaborated with the Boston Region MPO’s Central Transportation Planning Staff (CTPS) to compare our accessibility model’s results against those generated by the regional travel demand model. We found inevitable discrepancies between the two models, particularly within the probability of travelers using non-auto modes in the West Station area. To align the accessibility model results with the regional model, Renaissance introduced some guardrail factors – these were not draconian but helped ensure that discrepancies between the platforms didn’t introduce murkiness where clarity was sought.

The MAPC project demonstrated the effectiveness of multimodal accessibility analysis as a basis for providing insight into travel behavior. There are several reasons to be excited about that:

1. Accessibility is emerging as a common metric in transportation and land use planning applications. By demonstrating the connection to travel behavior, planners can glean at least rough insight into expected travel patterns from their accessibility maps . In turn, this insight can inform context-sensitive facility design, development review processes, and local connectivity investments.

2. One of the major emerging uses of accessibility is supporting equity analyses that describe who has what level of access to key destinations. Here again, the connection to travel behavior allows those analyses to move from simply describing what opportunities are reachable (which is still quite useful) to describing how transportation and land use factors interact with socioeconomic and demographic attributes – and ultimately influencing the utility offered by the complete transportation system.

3. Planners need ways to generate travel insights that don’t depend on travel demand models but offer a comparable level of rigor. That’s because the questions planners often want to answer are difficult to put to most regional travel models and because multimodal travel is increasingly important in transportation planning and infrastructure funding. As planning emphases evolve, it is difficult to adapt legacy travel models that are very useful for their primary intended purpose (highway planning) but often limited for other purposes. The variables to which planners seek sensitivity may not always translate into the regional model’s datasets or operative relationships. As demonstrated in the Boston area, an accessibility-based framework can offer more flexibility to expose those variables and define those relationships in robust ways.

This last point brings me back to the art of analysis – in this case, focusing on model development. It is common for analysts to presume that the best-fitting model is of paramount importance. In doing so, they can deem variables that planners and community stakeholders care about as “not statistically significant.” While we don’t want any noise in our models, we also have no real use for models that can’t respond to our human-centered questions.

For MAPC’s Accessibility Model, we tested innumerable permutations of variables and interactions, challenging ourselves to define logical steps of the process through which critical variables could be operationalized and ensure they behaved intuitively. Sometimes you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, but we also do well to remember that our models and tools do not represent some quantitative tyranny. Rather, they are extensions of ourselves, imbued with our values, crafted by humans earnestly trying to make the world a better place.