SAI-P: Coupling Regional Economic Development with Transportation Planning for Sustainable Emerging Cities

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

In many regions of the country, economic development creates increased demand for transportation infrastructure. This can be especially challenging for small- and medium-size cities, where such development can impact quality of life in both positive and negative ways. This SAI planning project identifies opportunities to better couple economic development activities with transportation infrastructure investments, with a particular focus on maximizing the quality of life of current and future residents of small- and medium-sized growing towns and cities.

It brings together diverse stakeholders to better understand current practices in this coupling and to identify barriers for improving such coupling. A top priority is to ensure that proactive coupling of economic development and transportation planning allows for an equitable distribution of the positive and negative impacts of development across residents of a community.

The project produces a research agenda through focus groups on topics including coupled economic development and transportation infrastructure planning, equity in quality-of-life development impacts for community residents, and improving equity in coupled regional development and infrastructure planning. The focus groups include stakeholders in local and regional government, transportation authorities, community groups, and researchers.

The project aims to provide a roadmap on how emerging cities can leverage economic growth in a sustainable and equitable manner over the next several decades.

This SAI planning project combines stakeholder-engaged participatory research methods, transportation network analysis, and operations research models for long-term infrastructure planning. The project develops methods for proactive investment in transportation infrastructure to meet increased demand resulting from economic development. This approach helps to ensure that the quality of life of current and future community residents is not detrimentally impacted by such development and, ideally, improves through it.

The planning activity also provides insight about how best to improve equity in economic development impacts (positive and negative) across community residents. The implementation of participatory research methods co-produces knowledge on the current practical barriers that limit better coupling between economic development and transportation infrastructure while facilitating the transition of results into practice.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.