Minnesota Department of Transportation joins Smart Growth America’s artist-in-residence program, by hosting a Community Vitality Fellow to creatively meet the agency’s goals of promoting economic vitality, improving safety, supporting multimodal transportation systems, and creating healthier communities.
For the second meeting of the Safe Streets, Smart Cities Academy, teams from Huntsville, AL and Pittsburgh, PA traveled to meet their peers in Durham, NC. During the meeting, teams honed in on next steps for their safety demonstration projects and talked about how to define success and measure the outcomes from their demos. Teams also worked to strengthen skills in community engagement and collaboration across sectors and jurisdictions.
Designing the commercial corridors where we live, work, and shop to move high volumes of cars as quickly as possible isn’t just dangerous. It also has severe consequences for health, economic viability, and equity along these corridors. We collaborated with the Urban Land Institute on a new research report that measures the impact of unsafe, unhealthy corridor conditions; examines how common these conditions are across the country; and digs into what can be done to change this trend.
As we prepare for site visits in six new communities to develop strategies for local small-scale manufacturing this month, we’re taking a look back at the places we helped in 2016. Two communities—Lowell, MA and Twin Falls, ID—have made some impressive progress to support their budding maker businesses; their work shows how promising this emerging sector can be for building livable communities and healthy economies.
Earlier this month the National Complete Streets Coalition walked through the finding of Dangerous by Design 2019 on a webinar and answered some top questions during the broadcast. While we weren’t able to get to all of the questions live, here are the answers to some popular questions we received.
The National Complete Streets Coalition recently worked with 35 transportation and public health professionals from the Denver region on Complete Streets policy adoption and implementation in a suburban context. In the six months since our final workshop, the three participating cities have launched cross-departmental and cross-jurisdictional working groups to develop custom Complete Streets ordinances.
This November, teams of planners, engineers, and law enforcement and public health officials from three cities convened in Huntsville, AL for the first workshop of the Safe Streets, Smart Cities Academy. Over two days we covered how cities are addressing emerging new mobility technologies, how to engage the community more inclusively, and began the process of identifying sites for the temporary safety demonstration projects each city will implement in the coming spring.
“If Transportation for America doesn’t do what they do at the national scale, we would be in trouble at the local level. We count on them to lead at the national level and equip us with the knowledge and expertise to do the same locally.”
The newly created Opportunity Zones program will likely go down as the largest and most significant federal community development initiative in U.S. history, with trillions of dollars in new private investment about to start flowing into pre-designated low-income communities around the country.
We work hard every day to make communities safer and more resilient as they grow and change, the climate warms, and economies become more interconnected. So whether you make an end of year gift to get some SGA bling or for the post-giving fuzzy feelings (or both!) we appreciate your support.