Abstract
To address the growing uncertainties in the future transportation industry, planners and engineers have identified and implemented scenario planning, a multi-step and strategic approach, in long-range transportation planning. A comprehensive examination of how equity is envisioned, planned, and analyzed during this process remains absent, despite several key guidelines of scenario planning exercises. This paper conducts a systematic literature review focusing on how equity has been considered and evaluated in scenario planning. The resources include academic papers, agency reports, and materials from the recent scenario planning conference, the 2nd Conference on Scenario Planning in Transportation hosted by the Transportation Research Board. This paper examines equity in scenario planning in three important ways: 1) the ways equity has been integrated across steps; 2) how equity analysis has evolved; and 3) when it is necessary to consider equity. This work adds value to the existing body of knowledge by presenting the policy implications based on the review of the current scenario planning research and practices. Early policy recommendations include the need for more vertical equity evaluations, the construction of robustness and justice indicators, and the adoption of a flexible mindset of planning for rather than being fixated on a single scenario.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 85-95 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Transport Policy |
| Volume | 145 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2024 |
Funding
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) defines scenario planning as a method of strategic planning that employs alternative narratives of possible futures (or future states) to simulate decisions to make more informed decisions and develop future plans (Federal Highway Administration 2015). Incorporating scenario planning into the creation of long-range transportation plans began as pilot programs in the early 2000s (John, 2011). Since then, FHWA has also created a number of workshops and released several guidebooks in an effort to spread the best practices and methods for scenario planning. Table 1 summarizes the guidebooks that have been sponsored by FHWA.The inclusion and exclusion process is summarized in Fig. 1. The database search identified 473 studies based on the keyword search. In the screening step, studies that were not related to urban or transportation planning (i.e., water systems, biology, and structural engineering) were excluded. After examining the abstracts, studies focusing on short-range transportation planning, small areas (e.g., university campuses), or operations research were excluded. Several non-English, duplicated, and inaccessible documents were also eliminated. This left 133 studies for full-text review. After reviewing the full texts, those without mentioning the concept of equity anywhere in the article were excluded. This review left 32 studies for this paper. This result suggests that the present scenario planning procedures often overlook the concept of equity. Twenty-two of these studies were public reports and nine of them were research publications. Since 2004, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has sponsored 16 scenario planning workshops in 16 states. It is noted that most reports reviewed in this paper are summaries from these workshops.
Keywords
- Equity
- Scenario planning
- Strategic planning
- Systematic literature review
- Transportation