At metropolitan planning organizations such as the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA), planning investments to support pedestrian trips for a large and diverse metropolitan area would be an intractable challenge without an open, coordinated, and cooperative approach and a strong information foundation. To address this challenge, NJTPA has adopted an innovative approach using regional analysis and priority setting to guide planning activity for a very local scale. The design and initial applications of this approach are described. Areas with proximity and connectivity features supporting pedestrian activity were identified using data available at the regional level. The data were analyzed within a pedestrian potential index (PPI) comprising four key indicators: population densities, employment densities, land use mix, and street network density, all analyzed at the census tract level. Thresholds were set to begin to find priority areas in which investment in pedestrian strategies would be more likely to generate a high return in terms of walking trips generated. The analysis also allows local planners to understand how their communities compare in relative levels of density, land use mix, and network connectivity. This information can help planners identify areas for planning activities that would address these factors and encourage walking trips. With the first results from application of the PPI, NJTPA has solicited feedback from state and local planning partners. With subsequent refinement, this analysis will be finalized for the region and incorporated in the next update of the NJTPA Regional Transportation Plan.

Innovative structuring of the decision-making process has allowed a large metropolitan planning organization, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA), to face the challenge of cooperatively developing a long-range transportation investment agenda in a complex and diverse region. The wide range of applicable geographic scales is a problem when exploring alternative strategies in such a region, so a single, multiscaled, technically based planning analysis was designed and conducted to unify decision makers around a comprehensive set of performance goals and the estimated potential effects of all reasonable actions. The analysis, built within an accelerated 10-month time frame under federal scrutiny, relied on participation by elected officials, planners, engineers, and regional stakeholders. It produced a full regionwide identification of long-term performance needs and an exhaustive assessment and prioritization of location-specific strategies. NJTPA applied this prioritization to select strategies to update its long-range transportation plan and to develop specific immediate guidance for implementation agencies.