
Maintenance activities, such as repaving a roadway, offer an opportunity for modest, low-cost improvements toward more complete streets. Photo by Barbara McCann.
This post is the sixth in a twice-monthly series of excerpts from Completing Our Streets: The Transition to Safe and Inclusive Transportation Networks, the new book from Island Press by Barbara McCann, founder of the National Complete Streets Coalition. The book discusses the keys to the movement’s success, and how places and practitioners in the United States are tackling the challenges of putting a new transportation paradigm into daily practice.
All National Complete Streets Coalition Platinum Partners and those who upgrade to the next Partnership level will receive a signed copy of Completing Our Streets. Become a Coalition Partner today!
From Chapter 5: Looking for Every Opportunity
Integrating a Complete Streets approach into maintenance and operations projects allows change to begin to happen right away, and such projects also have value precisely because they are pedestrian in the first sense of the word. In Anniston, Alabama, city councilman Jay Jenkins told the Anniston Star that the city’s new Complete Streets policy would be “a plodding kind of change.” The initial changes made to complete the streets can be modest and unimaginative, but within this drudgery lies the makings of metamorphosis.