While reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyên, I found myself thinking about planning, and about how often our professional tools quietly shape the world in ways that are both powerful and poorly understood.

Nguyên writes about how designing a score does far more than evaluate outcomes. Over time, the score reshapes decision-making itself. People adapt to it, institutions optimize for it, and gradually the metric can drift away from the deeper values it was meant to represent.

In transportation and land use planning, this dynamic is not abstract. In very real ways, metrics have built our environment.

When congestion became the goal

For decades, transportation systems were optimized for congestion relief, guided by the intuition that reducing delay would naturally improve people’s lives. Building more capacity felt rational and humane. Once congestion reduction was the target, the system reorganized around winning that game — by adding capacity, crowding out learning about deeper causes like land use, access, and choice. This is exactly the failure mode Nguyên warns about.

VMT reduction helped, but didn’t complete the picture

California’s shift toward Vehicle Miles Traveled reduction was a meaningful step forward. VMT captures climate impacts and land use patterns far better than congestion ever could. But it can be reduced on paper without improving people’s lived experience, and it often places pressure on local agencies even when the conditions for genuine change are not yet present.

Even our best metrics struggle

Mode share is often treated as a signal of sustainability or success, yet a decline in drive share does not necessarily reflect improved mobility or choice. Someone living in poverty may walk everywhere because they have no alternative, not because the system works well for them. Mode share describes movement patterns, not agency or dignity.

The closest the field has come to addressing this gap is accessibility research that focuses on destinations rather than facilities. The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory measures how many jobs and essential destinations people can reach within given travel times, offering a more human-centered view of opportunity.

Even here, important aspects of human experience remain difficult to capture, and complexity makes these measures hard for the public to engage with.

What are we actually trying to measure?

What we ultimately want is a flourishing population — people who are healthy, connected, and able to live meaningful lives on their own terms.

I have been thinking about this problem for a while. The Towards Human-Scale Transport Metrics presentation I gave at TRB in 2020 was an attempt to work through what it would mean to measure transportation systems from the perspective of people’s actual experiences rather than system-level proxies. The questions Nguyên raises make me think there is still a lot more to work out.