A new flurry of study results, meetings, and reports from the public health community – including a specific recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – are pointing the way toward complete streets policies as an important tool in the fight against the obesity crisis.
The town of Edmonston in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., is a small hamlet of under 2000 residents, most of them blue-collar workers. Like many other cities in America, times are tough in Edmonston, which has high rates of unemployment and foreclosure. What makes life particularly hard for Edmonston is that it is bisected by the Anacostia River. Due to poor environmental practices, the Anacostia periodically floods the town, wreaking devastation on a place already struggling to get by.
News on complete streets comes in daily now, so we’re going to start a new feature in our blog to keep everyone – including us! – up to speed.
During the housing crash it became clear that not all parts of the country were being affected equally — and not even all areas within a metro area were performing the same. In the DC region, foreclosures were rising and home prices were falling rapidly in several exurban counties, while prices were holding mostly steady … Continued
The report featured in last Thursday’s Washington Post (“Highway Conditions Contribute to Over Half of Fatal Auto Crashes”) got it half right: highway design does affect safety. But the argument that road and bridge widening is a cure for fatalities is wrong. That recommendation could have been written in 1959, and has been refuted on the ground in projects around the country.
More than 150 partners gathered on June 29th & 30th in Indianapolis to learn about the importance of Complete Streets and to organize a campaign to develop both state and local policies.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) stepped up its commitment to complete streets yesterday with its adoption of a formal Complete Streets Policy. The new document fleshes out many details and sets a clear exceptions process.
For a few years now, EPA and the Smart Growth Network have been sponsoring a regular series of terrific lectures on smart growth and related issues here in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. They’ve had well-known authors, innovators and special guests from all over the country come to talk about different aspects of … Continued
Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell signed Senate Bill 735, the Complete Streets bill, into law on Independence Day, making Connecticut the tenth state to pass complete streets legislation and the second to do so this year.
Smart Growth America State Policy Director Will Schroeer was on Fox Business this morning, discussing our 120-day report from Minneapolis.