| Issue 81 | May 31, 1996 |
| Issue 81 | May 31, 1996 |
Why care about this? For one reason, the TIP can give the best overview of where public transportation funds are going in the region, and therefore, of the real direction of transportation policy. For instance, with a computer spreadsheet version of the NYC TIP, Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign were able to sort projects to calculate that 95% of NYC traffic safety capital spending from 1994-1999 would be devoted to motorist safety (although pedestrians represent the majority of traffic fatalities in the 5 boroughs each year). Second, the TIP can provide a good picture of what transportation agencies have in store for any particular neighborhood, district or county.
The region now has a potential alternative to the phone-book capital program. Under contract to U.S. DOT, the consulting firm Konheim and Ketcham has completed a demonstration program hooking Westchester County TIP data to the Internet's World Wide Web (look up the demonstration at http://www.where.com/WesTIP/). If adopted by agencies, the software could incorporate the transportation capital program for the entire metropolitan area. It would increase by orders of magnitude the numbers of citizens able to see what transportation agencies are really up to.
Perhaps for that reason, New York State DOT and the staff of the NY Metropolitan Transportation Council appear uninterested in the Internet TIP. Where other states are pioneering public information access via the Internet, transportation planners in the Mid-Hudson area, New York City and Long Island cannot even agree on a common computer format. Thus, the downstate area TIP is a dreadful exercise in stapling together big, incompatible-format paper print-outs. Downstate agencies are about to start a new round of TIP development, which will yield yet another impenetrable shelf-hogging document
Transportation project data in electronic form
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