The types of development projects that contribute to vibrant walkable, equitable, and sustainable communities can be complicated and often challenging to finance. So we’re doing something new to connect potential investors and developers with smart growth projects in search of a partner: the LOCUS Smart Growth Showcase.
The Form-Based Codes Institute highlights a great form-based code (or codes) each year with the Richard H. Driehaus Form-Based Code Award to show what’s possible with good zoning. If you know of a form-based code that is promoting great development and accessible streets, nominate it for the 11th annual Driehaus Award.
With the announcement that Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome have been selected to serve as artists-in-residence with WSDOT for a year, Washington becomes the first state to embed an artist in a statewide agency.
Conventional land use regulations have contributed to a great divide in our country, producing sprawling places that are marked by a stark separation of both uses and people. But form-based zoning is emerging as a creative tool for cities to remedy the inequities often produced by the conventional system.
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.
This March, we hosted “Where to begin: How two communities are addressing pedestrian safety,” the latest installment in our monthly webinar series Implementation & Equity 201: The Path Forward to Complete Streets. A recording of the webinar is now available.
State departments of transportation (DOTs) direct most of the transportation spending in the United States but they’re often focused on building highways and are ill-equipped to address the far more diverse mix of challenges they’re tasked with solving today. In a month-long series we just wrapped up, we examined how we got here, what state DOTs need to change, and how one state is putting its intentions into practice.
State DOTs have a major role to play in reversing the nation’s epidemic of pedestrian deaths. But that can be hard to do when most DOTs are still set up to build roads that prioritize high-speed car travel, even if that jeopardizes the safety of some of the people using those roads. Tennessee DOT is working to change that through a comprehensive approach to Complete Streets.
State DOTs often use guidance and a project selection process that leads to overbuilt projects that don’t fit their context and are ill tailored to the needs of the community. To build better projects that fit in the areas they serve, state DOTs need to acknowledge land use and context and update their project selection process to focus on outcomes.
Last week the arts & culture team caught up with this year’s State of the Art (SOTA) Transportation Training participants to learn how arts organizations and transportation agencies in these communities are successfully collaborating to address unique transportation challenges. We’re also releasing the DIY Toolkit so that you can hold SOTA Transportation Trainings in your own community.