As my close friends and colleagues know, I shunned my AICP certification almost a year ago.  The reason was based on a few things:

• For the $400 I would have spend on APA+AICP, I can have ITE+TRB, which are more vital to any transportation planner
• I really don’t want to be a member of APA.  It has done little for me, and Planning magazine has published questionable articles on more than one occasion.  One article even made me think that the author was high on drugs.  However, you cannot split APA and AICP.
• While the AICP Commission tried to make AICP actually mean something by requiring CM, their one step forward took two steps back when they attempted to use it as a money-making opportunity for APA and requires approval for all hours.  This means that if you go to Ohio Model User Group meetings or attend Travel Model Improvement Program webinars, you’re not getting any certification maintenance credit for it.  If you are a Professional Engineer or a Professional Transportation Planner (the certification through TCSB), you get credit for these things.

In keeping up with things going on in the field, I received an email from the Florida DOT Weekly Briefs.  In it, they had a link to “State of Transportation Planning 2010″.  They had an overview of some important topics (with suggested reading), but missed two, including:

• FINANCE. one of the biggest topics currently impacting transportation.
• SAFETY.  There are almost 40,000 people killed on America’s roads and another 300,000 injured.  Distracted driving has received a lot of attention because of the crashes that it causes and has the potential to cause.  Toyota has recalled some 8 million vehicles due to problems with sticking gas pedals, brakes, or steering.

Aside from the obvious blunders above, there are a few more that I think need to be pointed out.

First off, this is not a “state of” anything.  This is a very basic introductory document that points people to a few seemingly randomly selected works in that field.  Looking at the travel behavior section, there are several research works (and having met some of these authors, I know they are great resources).  The one thing that we already have as travel demand modelers that illustrates the “state of” is Transportation Research Board Special Report 288.  It is so vitally important to us that we know it by number (and it is the only one, in my case).  SR288 goes through in sometimes painful detail to talk about the state of travel forecasting.

Second off, policy is centered entirely around climate change.  They evidently haven’t been following Climategate, else they would have dropped the link to “Moving Cooler” (considering that areas near Washington DC received an uncharacteristic 5 feet of snow in some places, you’d think that might tip them off).  Obviously, the jury is still out on whether the globe is getting hotter or colder, but if you talk with real people, many feel that Global Warming isn’t occurring.  Stuff like that happens when you mess with data and hard code models for certain outputs.

So yeah, as Marty Brenaman (play-by-play radio host for the Cincinnati Reds) says quite often, “A swing and a miss”.

Here’s the link: TPD_State_of_Transportation.

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