Abstract

Transportation sector is held responsible as the major contributor to climate change due to increased Green House Gas emissions resulting from excessive travel. Travel demand theory suggests that most travel is a result of the existing land uses. The regional planning council is responsible to develop the Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) that plans the development for existing and future ‘transportation-land use’ projects. However, no protocol has been developed to evaluate the LRTP, even when transportation sector is responsible for the CO₂ and NO₂ emission, two of the major GHGs. This study conducts a thorough review of existing protocols developed to evaluate the local, state, coastal, and climate action plans to develop a protocol that can help evaluate the awareness, analysis and action of the LRTPs for climate change for six metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in Texas, US. This can help [1] provide important insight to develop policies and strategic approaches to deal with CO₂ emission from transportation sector, [2] compare the actions and process of communities proactive about climate change issues with communities that aren’t to provide policy recommendation and [3] standardize the plans to match the protocol thus helping the decision making stakeholders with policy formulation and inter and intra-governmental decision making.

Keywords: Protocol; Climate change; Plan evaluation; Transportation