I am writing you to see if you have time and interest to help the TRB
Arterial Health Task Force with a small project.   Earlier this year,
FHWA published a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) that seeks
comments on the National Performance Management Measures. This rule
making will create national performance management measures and
standards to be used by the States to meet the national transportation
goals identified in section 1203 of MAP-21. This rule making also
establishes the process to be used by States to set performance targets
that reflect their performance measures. The FHWA anticipates issuing up
to three rule makings in this area. This rule making also covers
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) and Freight issues. As of
this writing, August 9, there were 7,780 comments submitted.

So why is the Arterial Health Task Force interested in this. After
looking though the NPRM and reading some of the comments submitted it
became clear that some of the comments might help contribute to the
mission of the Task Force.

The Arterial Health Task Force was established to inform the planning,
design and operation of arterials while considering public and
population health.  The Task Force will achieve its mission by
developing a catalogue of research problem statements where we have
unanswered questions, points of disagreement or only anecdotal
evidence.  An example might be to try to answer the questions of the
impacts of living close to major roadways form a health perspective.
Evidence suggests that there may be some negative health implications,
but there is disagreement on issues of roadway size, proximity and
health severity.

With that as background, the comment period on these proposed
performance measures ends August 20, 2016.  As part of the comment
process, the general public is allowed to read the comments submitted to
the docket.   The proposed rules and the docket can be viewed at
https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=FHWA-2013-0054

What we are looking for are for people to scan through the comments and
see if there are any “research” type questions that we can tease out of
the comments and discuss with the Task Force Members.  For example, the
League of American Bicyclists and others have pointed out that “the rule
proposes that congestion mitigation be measured by delay for drivers and
vehicles". They note that "it fails to measure people not adding to that
congestion because they are biking, walking or taking transit”.  From
the Task Force perspective, this raises questions about what the
metric(s) should be and how do we develop metrics that account for all
the modes--some of which have more positive health benefits than others.

I know this might sound like a daunting task, but if this is an area
where you have an interest, you are working on your own comments or you
want to just help out, I am hoping that you can spend some time and look
through the Docket.  In the coming days I suspect that more and more
comments will be added.

If you go through the docket and generate any “research” type questions
relevant to the Task Force, or have any questions of your own, feel free
to pass them along to me.  To view the docket go to
https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=FHWA-2013-0054.  Also, if you are
interested in learning more about the Task Force visit our website at
http://www.trbarterialhealth.org/.  We have had three meeting since we
began in January and our notes are posted.

For this exercise we are not looking for comments or a discussion of the
proposed rules--that should be left for the Docket.  Instead we are
looking for research questions that the comments may evoke.

Thank you
Ed Christopher, Task Force Chair
edc@berwyned.com
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