School-Oriented Development: Bridging the Divide Between Education and Transportation Planning

This episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning is an installment of our safety series focusing one of the most overlooked levers in community safety: how kids get to school. Co-hosts Divya Gandhi and Em Hall sit down with Mathew Palmer, Senior Research Scholar and Project Director for SchoolCAMP at NC State University’s Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE), whose career began not in a planning office but in a South Los Angeles high school classroom, where watching how his students got to school pulled him toward transportation and community planning research. Mathew makes the case for school travel as a “holy grail” of intersectional planning. That is, a topic that touches land use, fiscal policy, greenhouse gas emissions, and public health all at once. He also unpacks why a persistent structural divide between the planning and education sectors endures even as the numbers make the cost of that divide hard to ignore: schools are among the largest employers and infrastructure investments in most communities, factor into roughly 20% of the cost of living when families choose a home, and drive an estimated 30% of morning traffic congestion. The conversation turns to the tools Mathew and the SchoolCAMP team have built to quantify the economic costs and benefits of school siting decisions; what it takes to bring skeptical school boards, developers, and elected officials on board; and what a truly well-planned system of schools, zoning, and transportation could accomplish for us all. Episode URL: https://planning.org/podcast/school-oriented-development-bridging-the-divide-between-education-and-transportation-planning/