Newest Resources

Pandemic-Resilient Community Planning: Practical Ways to Help Communities Prepare for, Respond to, and Recover from Pandemics and Other Economic, Social and Environmental Shocks
Resilience refers to a system’s ability to efficiently absorb shocks. This report investigates ways that communities can increase their resilience to pandemics and other sudden economic, social or environmental risks. It compares Covid-19 with other health risks, examines various problems caused by pandemic-control interventions, and recommends specific ways that communities can better prepare for, respond to, and recover from pandemics and other shocks.

Universal Urban Access: Toward Sustainable Mobility
This detailed report, edited by Todd Litman, evaluates urban transport problems and identifies effective solutions. It is one of six Global Roadmap of Action reports published by Sustainable Mobility for All, a major international program to achieve four policy goals (universal access, efficiency, safety and green) for all modes of transportation around the world.

Understanding Smart Growth Savings
Smart Growth policies create more compact, multi-modal development which reduces per capita land consumption and the distances between destinations. This, in turn, reduces the costs of providing public infrastructure and services, improves accessibility, and reduces motor vehicle travel, which provides many economic, social and environmental benefits. This report examines these impacts.

Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions: Implications for Transport Planning
This report explores the impacts of autonomous vehicles, and their implications for various planning issues. It investigates how quickly self-driving vehicles are likely to develop and be deployed based on experience with previous vehicle technologies; their likely benefits and costs; and how they are likely to affect travel demands and planning decisions such as optimal road, parking and public transit supply.

Urban Sanity: Understanding Urban Mental Health Impacts and How to Create Saner, Happier Cities
This report examines how urban living affects residents’ mental health and happiness, and ways to use this information to create saner and happier cities. City living may increase some forms of psychosis and mood disorders, drug addiction, and some people’s unhappiness, but tends reduce dementia, alcohol abuse and suicide rates, and many people are happier in cities than they would be in smaller communities. This analysis suggests that it is possible to create sane and happy cities.