Objectives: To enhance in-service courses and university transportation programs, to quickly disseminate and ultimately apply new research results and provide broad inter-disciplinary training to planning and transportation professionals; to raise the awareness of young people and the public about relationships between individual travel behavior, transportation systems, and environmental conditions; and to provide resources to assist decision makers with identifying transportation decisions that promote sustainability.
Discussion: Education is a crucial component of this research program, and will be increasingly emphasized beyond the first two-year period, when core research activities and case studies are building an integrated knowledge base for dissemination. Efforts under this initiative will fill important gaps in current transportation education, by focusing on the complexity and inter-relationships between transportation and the environment, and on developing an understanding among key groups of the need for inter-disciplinary solutions to
move towards greater sustainability. This initiative will also build on several on-going Federal educational partnership programs with important relationships to transportation and sustainability, for example, the DOT's University Transportation Centers Program. This will be accomplished with educational programs in three areas: enhancement of in-service training for transportation professionals and college curricula in professional programs; education programs for the general public, including programs in schools; and provision of information to state, regional, local, and business decision makers.
This initiative will add a new focus for transportation and environmental education programs currently supported by DOT, EPA, and other agencies, to create an effective broad-based education program to inform and influence individual, business, and government transportation
choices that are sustainable.
Outputs:
New curricula for transportation professionals that are inter-disciplinary and focus on creative solutions to sustainability problems.
Educational materials and programs for the general public, including schools, that effectively inform the public about the sustainability of locational and travel decisions.
Conferences, workshops, and resource materials that educate business and government decision makers about the need for inter-disciplinary solutions and the role transportation plays in sustainability.
Outcomes: At every level of our society there is better understanding of the relationships between individual travel choices, transportation systems, and community and global sustainability, an improved ability to address and support emerging issues with creative and innovative solutions. Popular and professional publications reflect a more sophisticated and up-to-date understanding of these relationships.
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