The land use-transportation system is just that-a system-but it is seldom planned or managed as such. Instead, roads are viewed in isolation, and system performance is measured by levels of service on individual roadways. Operating speed becomes the essential element in transportation planning. The emphasis on speed encourages excess travel and contributes to urban sprawl, undermining society's environmental, energy, and growth management goals. In Florida and Washington State, the search is on for better ways to measure transportation system performance. Adding impetus is the neotraditional planning movement, which has rejected speed as the ultimate measure of performance but only hinted at what might replace it. A paradigm shift in performance measurement-from speed to personal mobility, accessibility, livability, and sustainability-is argued. Alternative performance measures used around the United States are identified and assessed preliminarily. Growth management systems of the future will almost certainly rely on multiple measures, not discarding speed but giving weight to other considerations as well.

Now, traditionally, traffic experts have operated with one objective: to move people into and around cities as rapidly and efficiently as possible.... Speed becomes uppermost, and the fact that it is never obtained, no matter what contrivances the engineers make, never seems to deter them in their pursuit of it.... Cities should be an end, not a means. Rationally one wants to have traffic stop there, not go through, one wants movement within them to be slow, not fast.(1, pp. 255-256)