Transportation Plan

Policy: Using the goals and policies you developed for your previous assignment, provide a concise statement of your overall objectives for your transportation investment plan.  You should feel free to change your goals and policies from the previous assignment if you want. Public input: list how you should conduct public outreach efforts. This can be both traditional methods but should also include at least one innovative measure. You should clearly identify the 4 methods you would rely most heavily on and provide two sentences on each measure of why it is important. Data collection: You should cite which data you used for your analysis. There should be a quick discussion of what data was lacking and what you would have hoped to of had to improve your analysis. Existing system: Normally in a planning exercise, this is a big component of the plan but for this exercise you do not need to do any work. Identification of needs: Using the data that you have, identify where you think the state needs to put extra effort. This only needs to be broad brushed- for example: “we should focus more on transit expansion” or “we need to fix our bridges”. Financial capacity: you have been given financial data about how much is spent for each of the portions of the surface transportation system. A crucial part of this assignment is that you need to raise an additional $1 billion over the next 5 years to pay for your solutions that you propose in the next section. You can propose any method of raising these funds: tax increases, borrowing, hiking tolls or transit fares or using the private sector. You must identify how much is raised by each action and justify who will bear the burden of the increased costs.  Remember- you have 5 years to raise your funds – so a 1 cent of gas tax gives you revenue for each of your five years. Plan of Action: You should discuss where you think the Commonwealth should allocate its resources. For this exercise, there are no constraints on how you can move money around. You can use tolls collected from the Turnpike to go to transit or you can take MBTA sales tax revenue and shift it to highways. A central part of this section is a description of where you would spend your extra $1 billion.