Any number of agencies—city, county, metro region, or state—may be responsible for the streets and sidewalks, often with overlapping authority. This is why the strongest Complete Streets policies clearly define who is responsible, what level of coordination is required, and even when or how outside parties must comply.
What facilitates the transition from a policy into tangible street designs? To bring a Complete Streets policy to life, engineers need to know how to design these streets in very clear, concrete terms. The best Complete Streets policies will adopt excellent street design guidance that directs and supports practitioners to create an accessible and complete network of streets.
Streets don’t exist in a vacuum. They are inextricably connected to the buildings, sidewalks, spaces, homes, businesses, and everything else around them that they serve. The strongest Complete Streets policies require the integration of land-use planning to best sync up with a community’s desires for using and living on their land today and in the future.
How do you know if your Complete Streets policy is working? You measure it. And then you share the results publicly. A strong Complete Streets policy requires tracking performance measures across a range of categories—including implementation and equity—and making someone responsible for doing it.
Every local community, region, and state has a process by which they choose which transportation projects to fund and build. A strong Complete Streets policy changes that process by adding new or updated criteria that give extra weight to projects that advance Complete Streets and improve the network.
A formal commitment to a Complete Streets approach is just the beginning. A strong policy also spells out specific steps for implementing the policy in ways that will make a measurable impact on what gets built and where.
Northwest Arkansas (NWA) is experiencing a significant and fast paced population growth, and, as a result, housing supply is constrained. A regional approach is needed to sufficiently address this housing crisis and develop a plan to accommodate the population growth throughout the region. Smart Growth America (SGA) partnered with ULI Northwest (ULI NWA) in a … Continued
Saying that the “Complete Streets mindset” is the problem when a transportation agency builds a dangerous high-speed road and calls it a “complete street” is like calling for the repeal of the Clean Air Act when a highway agency claims their widening project will reduce emissions.
Last week, Smart Growth America submitted comments on the design of the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program (ECJ Program), created under the Inflation Reduction Act, on the types of projects EPA could prioritize, requirements that should be applied to ensure projects are community-driven, and different types of technical assistance that could support the … Continued
Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released final data for 2021 revealing that drivers of motor vehicles struck and killed 7,341 people while walking that year. This massive 12.4 percent increase over 2020 is both higher than predicted and illustrative of the urgent need for a better approach to gathering and collecting this data. We can’t say we care about a crisis that we are failing to measure well.