Transportation planning is becoming more complex every year. Decision makers face tougher questions, tighter constraints, and rising expectations. At the same time, many of the “big levers” that shape regional mobility and accessibility, including land-use patterns and major transportation infrastructure, have already been set. Despite this, planners are being asked to solve increasingly multifaceted problems.
At RSG, our team of planners helps clients navigate this reality by taking the data and models other areas of our firm produce and applying them to those tough planning and transportation investment decisions. Our role is to provide clear, transparent decision-support information: not telling people what to decide but giving them trustworthy information that helps communities choose a path forward with confidence.
We spoke with Jeff Frkonja, a Market Leader at RSG, about what this work looks like in practice, how his team balances scientific objectivity with political realities, and why he finds it important to remind teams of the human impact behind every technical decision. His insights offer a grounded and objective view of the pressures shaping transportation planning today and the role RSG plays in helping clients make better-informed decisions.
How do you explain the work of your team to someone familiar with RSG through work outside of planning?
Our team takes the data and tools that the teams at RSG produce (household travel survey data and travel models) and applies them directly to transportation planning and transportation investment decisions and products. Such decisions often involve tough questions about what’s best for a specific community based on its goals, objectives, and long-term vision.
In that sense, we’re in the business of providing “the answer,” or at least a range of answers. I describe that work as decision-support information. We’re not telling people what to decide; we’re giving them the information they need to make the best transportation planning decisions they can at the time with the data available to them. For many of our clients, the plans we produce or help produce have regulatory force, so these decisions are consequential.
Can you share a recent project where your team helped move from data and models to an adopted decision?
A good example is our work with the City of SeaTac to update their comprehensive plan, which required both transportation and land-use analysis and policy thinking. SeaTac contains one of the busiest airports in the country and much of its land area, transit usage, and traffic are shaped by airport activity. At the same time, the city wants to be an attractive, livable community offering high-quality services, amenities, and neighborhoods for residents and workers, including lower-income and historically underserved populations.
To support this plan update, we refreshed the city’s travel forecast model. We began with household travel survey data we collected for the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) and a regional model we previously built for PSRC. We then customized that model for SeaTac’s local travel patterns and added an airport submodel originally developed for the San Diego region.
This project is a clear example of how transportation planning and land-use planning intersect. We ran land-use scenarios—evaluating denser development patterns and complete-streets investments—to determine whether the city could meet its transportation and growth goals. The analysis showed that the preliminary proposed land-use policies and supportive transportation investments would achieve those goals, giving leaders confidence to adopt the plan, which ultimately received a national award.
How do you balance objectivity with the subjective realities behind many planning decisions?
First, we adhere to our values. That means doing the right thing with data and forecasts, even when the results are not aligned with any stakeholder assumptions going into a project. Maintaining objectivity is essential in RSG’s approach to transportation planning, where decisions can become politicized. That actually helps us deal with the natural subjectivity of these things, because we are known for our evidence-based, scientific approach. In other words, our clients know that they can trust us not to take sides.
We’re also transparent from the outset. When we build tools like travel models, we calibrate them to observed conditions and validate them to ensure reliability. I often use the validation report to talk with decision makers about how the model works, how well it performs, and where uncertainties or error bounds exist.
Then we work with stakeholders to define the metrics that matter most to their transportation planning decisions. We make sure that the analytical tools can produce those metrics clearly, consistently, and relevantly to what they care about.
Doing this work up front, before decision makers are under public pressure, helps establish trust and reduces confusion later. And we always invite deeper questions if someone wants to understand how the tools we use work. We sit down with them and walk through the details. This transparency is essential to our (and our clients’) success.
Looking ahead, what shifts in transportation planning will most change the questions clients bring to us?
It’s an exciting time to work in transportation planning, but it’s also a difficult time to be a decision maker.
Clients face growing pressures from multiple directions. Much of the United States is already built out in terms of transportation infrastructure and urban form. While we add transit segments or occasional roadway improvements, the big structural decisions concerning how people move—plus where they live, work, and shop—were made decades ago. Many of today’s transportation problems could have been mitigated somewhat by different historic land-use decisions, but those patterns are now largely fixed.
At the same time, the expectations placed on transportation planners continue to rise. These include pushes to reduce emissions, address climate and human-health impacts, improve safety, address equity, sustain mobility, improve accessibility, and respond to community-specific needs. All of this is happening at more granular geographies than ever before.
Declining transportation revenue makes this landscape even more challenging. One tool consistently shown to help (dynamic roadway pricing) remains politically challenging to implement despite its benefits: reducing emissions, generating revenue, managing demand, and (when well-facilitated) bringing interests that are often opposed to agreement.
To be clear, this isn’t an “advocacy” statement. Data from New York, Stockholm, and London all show that post-pricing travel suffered less-congested conditions, moved people and goods more quickly, lowered emissions, and generated money to help maintenance and investment.
In short, clients face more demands, more scrutiny, and fewer resources. Our role at RSG is to help them make clear, defensible decisions in this increasingly complex transportation planning environment.
How is your team helping clients make sense of rapidly expanding data and new technologies?
Transportation planning today involves navigating an explosion of new data sources, mobility technologies, and analytical tools. We work closely with our travel model development and data-science colleagues to understand the value of these emerging assets. A major part of our role is vetting these resources, which means assessing their quality and determining what analysis they can realistically support.
The first step is understanding the inherent quality and features of any new dataset. Once we know that, we evaluate which transportation planning questions it can meaningfully help answer. Some carefully curated data assets remain extremely valuable; others have become less useful as the big-data ecosystem has evolved and shifted over time.
Ultimately, we help clients avoid any misunderstanding around uses and focus on data that genuinely improves their transportation planning decisions. My hope is that, over time, a consortium of responsible public, private, and nonprofit partners will emerge to leverage these datasets for the public good while protecting privacy. Until then, our job as planners is to help clients separate what’s valuable for their needs from what’s not.
What keeps you motivated, and how do you help teams stay connected to the human impact behind the technical details?
What motivates me is knowing that our work genuinely helps people. Transportation planning affects millions of people—how they will be able to move, travel, and access opportunity in the future. If RSG can give decision makers clearer, more relevant information, and help them adopt plans that truly solve for people’s needs, then we’re helping communities spend public money more wisely and effectively.
I remind my team of this regularly. We often spend weeks deep in a difficult technical problem. When we finally break through, I’ll pause and say: “Remember what this means. Someone with a tough transportation decision ahead will now have the information they need to choose a better path.”
It’s easy (and often fun!) to get buried in technical details. But keeping sight of the human impact, the way transportation planning shapes people’s lives, is what keeps me coming to work every day.
····························
Transportation planning decisions affect how people move through their communities every day. If you’re navigating a complex planning question, we’re here to help you move forward with confidence. Contact us to learn how RSG can help.
