| Summary: | Transportation, environment and community are related. However, the definition, criteria and indicators of community health are still not well understood by transportation planners, engineers and researchers, so are the relationships between transportation, environment and community health. To assist decision makers to understand what aspects of environment and community health impact studies need to be performed, and the corresponding criteria assessed during the planning stage of a transportation project, this research has developed a tool which consists of a metric and a concept map. The metric has three sub-metrics. Each sub-metric represents one dimension: transportation, environment and community health, respectively. The states of each dimension are evaluated by several criteria, and each criterion has several quantitative or qualitative indicators. The relationships between transportation, environment and community health were identified through linkages between the criteria, and are graphically illustrated via a concept map. Using this metric-concept map, an analyst is able to quickly identify which aspects of the environment and community health that could potentially be impacted by a transportation project. The metric-concept map has been applied to two case studies. The first case study involved capacity expansion of a highway while the second case study concerned with the addition of a transit route. These case studies demonstrated how the metric-concept map may assist an analyst to prescribe the scope of environment and community health impact studies. The applications included the use of relative change in the indicator values before and after a transportation project, and the addition of new indicators deemed important to a project. Keywords: Transportation, Environment, Community health, Metric, Concept map
|
|---|