I’ve been attending the joint MPAC/JPACT workshops on the Regional Transportation Plan. As part of the process they use keypad polling to determine support for various strategies. The responses are tallied in several groups: Policy Makers (elected officials and appointed committee members), staff, and others (mostly advocacy groups and a few citizens).

There’s an interesting split among the groups on ranking transportation strategies, which were scored on a five point scale:

Policy Makers:

1. High Capacity Transit (4.60)
2. Intelligent Transportation Systems (4.40)
3. Transit Service (4.32)

Government Staff:

1. Bike, pedestrians and trail (4.56)
2. Land use strategies (4.52)
3. Transit Service (4.44)

Others:

1. Bike, pedestrians and trail (4.66)
2. Land use strategies (4.43)
3. Intelligent Transportation Systems (4.46)

So why the attraction by the policy makers to the pricey strategy? And the lower priority (to be fair, it came in fourth) for the lower-cost bike and ped strategies?