This synthesis report will be of interest to department of transportation ( DOT) administrators, planning supervisors, managers, and staffs, as well as to planning consultants that work with them. It provides information for practitioners interested in the results of attempts to apply multimodal considerations at the statewide level and identifies key research findings. It covers post-ISTEA (Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991) processes and projects and both passenger and freight activities. The report examines the application of three multimodal aspects: alternatives, modal mix, and integration into three statewide planning functions, which include state planning, corridor studies, and financing, budgeting, and programming. The emphasis is on implementation. This report of the Transportation Research Board documents processes and research currently under development, using three approaches: a literature review, results of a survey of state DOTs, and five case studies. It cites the following states with exemplary practices in multimodal/intermodal transportation based on a 1998 report by the policy research project at the University of Texas on Multimodal/ Intermodal Transportation: Florida, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Within the structure of state government, some amount of transportation planning is usually performed within separate modal administrations, which may include aviation, bus, highway, ports, and rail, as well as separate toll agencies. Some states coordinate these planning efforts through a single office responsible for statewide multimodal planning; other states work to achieve such coordination without a centralized unit (described herein as the decentralized approach). To determine if there is value to centralizing statewide multimodal planning efforts within a single office, representatives from 50 states were surveyed regarding the utility of centralized versus decentralized multimodal statewide planning. Responses, in the form of written questionnaires and/or telephone interviews, were obtained from 41 states. Advantages of centralization included consistency of modal plans, better modal coordination (including detection of modal conflicts earlier in the process), an ability to examine the entire transportation system holistically, collective attention brought to smaller modes that otherwise might be overlooked, economies of scale for service delivery and employee development, and a greater likelihood that long-range planning will be performed instead of being eliminated by more immediate tasks (which might occur if such planning were located in an operational division). Advantages of decentralization included greater ease of obtaining modal support for the long-range plan since the planners and implementers are in the same functional unit, greater ease of tapping modal-specific expertise, an ability to focus on the most critical mode if one such mode is predominant, and organizational alignment with mode-specific state and federal funding requirements. Equally important were respondents' explanations of how the question of a centralized versus a decentralized approach may be overshadowed by external factors. These included constraints on how various transportation funds may be spent; the fact that having persons in the same office does not guarantee multimodal coordination; the recommendation that some efforts should be centralized and some should be decentralized; the increasing importance of MPOs, districts, and public involvement in planning efforts; and the suggestion that even after a solid analysis of alternatives, there may be cases where the recommendation is the same as what it would have been under traditional planning. In some instances, the use of performance measures may change the recommended approach. Finally, a subset of the free responses indicated that centralized multimodal planning can be beneficial but only if four constraints are met: modal staff work collaboratively, the centralized unit has funding or other authority, necessary modal-specific planning is not eliminated, and there is a clear linkage between the centralized unit and the agencies that perform modal-specific planning such that the latter can implement the recommendations of the former.

This synthesis will be of interest to transportation planners, environmental analysts, and government officials at the federal, state, regional, and local levels. It describes the state of the practice with respect to the procedures and methodologies used by planning agencies at all levels to plan and evaluate alternative multimodal passenger transportation and to integrate these plans with related land use and environmental issues. This report of the Transportation Research Board describes the federal studies and guidelines that are available and presents the findings of an extensive survey of state, regional, and local agencies to identify the evaluation methods that are being used in the practice. Selected case studies for five types of modal evaluation are presented: intercity corridor, regional study, regional screening, urban corridor, and regional programming.

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 544: Environmentally Sensitive Channel- and Bank-Protection Measures examines environmentally sensitive channel- and bank-protection measures and includes recommended design guidelines for their application and a selection system for helping to determine the most appropriate channel- and bank-protection measure. The selection system is presented as an interactive software program entitled "Greenbank," which can be found on the accompanying CD-ROM (CRP-CD-58). The selection system software (CRP-CD-58) is available for download in an ZIP format.

Over the past several years state departments of transportation (DOTs) have been faced with the challenge of mounting traffic congestion and dwindling transportation funds. It is against this backdrop that the need for optimal resource allocation decisions has become of utmost importance. Two emerging fields in transportation planning, performance measurement and multimodal planning, have the potential to assist agencies in investing transportation resources in the most effective manner. The confluence of these two fields at the strategic level, strategic multimodal performance measurement, is a promising approach for state DOTs looking to meet the public's growing transportation needs in spite of the dwindling financial resources available. Currently, many states are having difficulty developing performance measurement programs that incorporate a multimodal perspective to facilitate cross-modal comparisons. The objective of this research is to identify innovations and best practices at leading state DOTs in strategic multimodal performance measurement in order to assist other DOTs in the development or improvement of their strategic multimodal performance measurement programs. First, a review of literature examined the existing research related to performance measurement and multimodal planning. From this review of literature, a list of criteria was developed to evaluate strategic multimodal performance measurement programs. Additionally, a group of state DOTs with success in performance measurement or multimodal planning was identified. Next, a nationwide survey of multimodal practices at state DOTs was conducted to identify the current practices in strategic multimodal performance measurement. This survey, along with the literature review and discussions with practitioners, guided the selection of five state DOTs that case studies were performed on. Each of the case studies was organized and evaluated based on the criteria established in the literature review. The findings of this research suggest that performance measures for non-highway modes still lag behind those for highways, even in leading state DOTs. The findings also suggest that state DOTs have yet to develop a leading methodology for multimodal tradeoff analysis, but that performance measurement systems that are analogous across all modes have great potential for facilitating cross-modal comparisons.