Suchergebnisse

Scoping is a process that develops the budget, schedule, and explicit rationale for a transportation infrastructure project. Detailed interviews with Virginia scoping professionals provide a unique occasion to investigate challenges and potential improvements in this field. Problems include lack of a clear purpose statement from the planning process; incongruence between planning cost estimates and scoping estimates; scoping of projects not having full construction funding; insufficient participation from outside agencies; and insufficient documentation of follow-up commitments fulfilled after the scope is established. Solutions focused on process rather than technology and include distinguishing the prescoping meeting (where questions are raised) from the scoping meeting (where questions are answered), providing an accounting mechanism allowing some scoping to be performed prior to programming, and strengthening the link between scoping and planning. This article further suggests that scoping substantially influences a project's achievement of desired transportation outcomes.

Successful interagency cooperation regarding particular infrastructure investments, notably those involving transportation and land planning, is strikingly difficult to achieve. One successful approach entails the provision of technical assistance among agencies. This article reports the results of a 16-month pilot program where the local land development authority and the state department of transportation worked together to determine how land use affects transportation performance. The pilot confirmed published lessons for interagency cooperation but led to four new guidelines: (a) imperfectly and iteratively define a problem rather than waiting for all information, (b) get feedback early, (c) maintain momentum by setting short goals sufficiently tangible that they may be accomplished yet adequately difficult that they mark progress, and (d) change the project goal if the change will better suit the needs of the recipient of the assistance. Although simplistic, these guidelines reduce the common risk among busy agencies that nothing, rather than tangible assistance, will transpire.

This paper provides a descriptive overview of the various curriculum, teaching, advising and assessment changes implemented in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock through a series of recommendations made by the American Sociological Association in their 1990 monograph, Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major, under the Re‐forming‐the‐Major project supported by a grant from the American Association of Colleges. Curriculum changes structured new coursework concentrations and linked them with other community and academic programs. New critical thinking and collaborative learning modules were incorporated within all courses with specific demands required of all faculty. Also discussed are the multifaceted efforts to create a sense of community among faculty, staff and students within our program. An integral part of this effort was a systematic overhaul of our advising system and a stronger substantive (financial) support of our Sociology/Anthropology Club. An important by‐product of the program assessment activities was to develop a mechansim to assist faculty to buy into this change inducing initative. An Annual Review Menu was established to reward faculty for participation in new efforts and is also briefly presented alomg with some attendant problems.

Transportation projects are increasingly evaluated based on how they improve person throughput, which requires knowing the passenger car occupancy. Yet obtaining occupancies is labor intensive, leading agencies to rely on statewide values. How useful are locality-specific vehicle occupancies? A case study of 38 candidate Virginia highway investments showed an occupancy change of .15 randomly applied to one-half of the projects affects 24% to 42% of project rankings if locality-specific occupancies are used. Occupancy is not the only data element affecting project prioritization, but it is an underlooked one. The study showed that an occupancy uncertainty of .15 is equivalent to an uncertainty of 3.90% in the discount rate or 13.2% in assigned traffic volume. As these investments had a mean value of $17 M, this study demonstrated that when project prioritization metrics are based on person throughput, city-or county-specific occupancies are an integral component of a data-driven prioritization process.