Safe streets included in FAST Act — This month, Congress passed a five-year, $305 billion transportation bill—the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Notably, the bill requires all design for National Highway System roadways to take into account access for all modes of transportation. It also makes NACTO’s Urban Design Guide one of the standards for when the U.S. Department of Transportation designs roads, and it permits local governments to use their own adopted design guides if they are the lead project sponsor, even if it differs from state guidelines. Emiko Atherton, Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, issued a statement in response.
Tickets on sale: Complete Streets Dinner — Join the National Complete Streets Coalition and celebrate this year’s successes at our sixth annual dinner, featuring speaker Mayor Ballard of Indiananapolis, IN. The dinner is an intimate event that brings together advocates from across the country for food, fun, conversation, and cocktails, and will be held this year on the evening of Tuesday, January 12, 2016 in Washington, DC during the Transportation Research Board meeting. Tickets are selling quickly: get your seat today.
2,100 letters delivered to FHWA — Earlier this fall, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) put forward a great idea — a new rule that would dramatically ease federal design standards for many roadways and impact how communities build Complete Streets. Thank you to all who helped us deliver 2,100 letters to FHWA in support of these new design guidelines!
Pittsburgh hosts Complete Streets workshop — The National Complete Streets Coalition’s Emiko Atherton visited Pittsburgh this month to conduct a Policy Development Workshop with City staff, representatives from the Mayor’s Office, transit agency staff, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, health partners, local advocates, and other stakeholders. Thank you to all attendees and participants for a productive workshop!
Send us your Complete Streets policies — Have you passed a Complete Streets policy in 2015? Tell us about it! The National Complete Streets Coalition is currently collecting Complete Streets policies passed this year for documentation in our Policy Atlas and ranking in next year’s Best Complete Streets Policies of 2015 report. If your town, city, county, or region recently passed a Complete Streets policy, email Mary Eveleigh.
Support Complete Streets this holiday season — People across the country rely on the National Complete Streets Coalition to for policy guidance and hands-on tools to make streets safer for everyone who uses them. If you support this important work, make a charitable donation to the National Complete Streets Coalition.
(Re)Building Downtown: A Guidebook for Revitalization — Downtowns, Main Streets, and city centers across the country are witnessing a renaissance. As more Americans choose the convenience and connectivity of walkable neighborhoods, communities are seeing new businesses, restaurants, and shops open in areas that were formerly vacant or economically distressed. This movement is an exciting opportunity for communities. But for many places, the work needed to create a vibrant downtown can seem daunting. A new guidebook is designed to help. (Re)Building Downtown: A Guidebook for Revitalization is a new guide for local elected officials who want to re-invigorate and strengthen neighborhood centers of economy, culture, and history through a smart growth approach to development.
In case you missed it: “The Innovative MPO” webinar — Earlier this month, Transportation for America hosted “The Innovative MPO: How MPOs Can Save Money and Improve Safety by Adopting Complete Streets Policies.” The discussion investigated how metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) can reduce costs and improve safety for their residents by adopting Complete Streets policies and using those policies to help select projects. Missed the webinar? View the slides here.
New technical assistance opportunity — Earlier this month Smart Growth America announced a new project to help more people connect to public transportation easily, efficiently, and affordably. The Transit-Oriented Development technical assistance initiative, a project of the Federal Transit Administration in partnership with Smart Growth America, will include a competitively awarded technical assistance program, a peer-to-peer learning network, and a comprehensive online database of information related to transit-oriented development. Technical assistance requests are now being accepted. Local or regional governments with an active federally funded transit project through New Starts, Small Starts, or Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) are eligible to apply.
Video presentation: “Designing Better Places” — Why do many towns and cities seem to have split personalities? The older areas, built before World War II, feel inviting. It’s possible to walk safely, the buildings are interesting to look at, and there are places where you’d like to sit and visit. In contrast, the majority of places built in the past 60 years feel totally different. Newer commercial areas are often accessible only by vehicle, and when you’re not inside a building, lingering doesn’t seem appealing. This video series answers why this is, how it happened, and what can be done to create more successful and inviting places that people and cars can share.
Dangerous street design can kill — Traffic fatalities are on the rise up again, with an increase of 8.1 percent in the first half of 2015, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). As is their practice, NHTSA officials are attributing the problem to driver (or passenger) error, but did promise “new initiatives to protect vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists.” The hazards NHTSA flags are real, but Robert Steuteville at Better Cities & Towns says the agency is also overlooking another major culprit: dangerous street design, propagated by an engineering profession that’s still pushing a “bigger is better” agenda.
The mortality impact, bicycle paths and lanes — Guidelines for bicycle infrastructure design tend to consider safety issues but not wider health issues. A new study explores the overall health impact of bicycle infrastructure provision, including not just road safety impacts, but also the population health impacts stemming from physical activity as well as cyclists׳ exposure to air pollution. Study outcomes suggest that a reduction of all-cause mortality is to be expected from building bicycle lanes and paths along busy roads with mixed traffic. The overall benefits are large enough to achieve a high benefit-cost ratio for bicycle infrastructure.
Last week, the Florida Department of Transportation released its Complete Streets Implementation Plan, a new and innovative approach to designing roads. The plan recognizes the need for room and a safe place for the various modes of transportation and it guides road design according to a particular community and transportation needs and purpose. The plan also outlines how “key standards, manuals, procedures, policies, guides, reports, and other documents need to be changed to align with the new approach working in cooperation with state, regional and local officials, partners, and communities.”
New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) has put out a plan to add a protected bike lane on Sixth Avenue from 14th Street to 33rd Street, and electeds want more. A letter from State Senator Brad Hoylman and five other representatives calls for a more thorough Complete Street redesign along all of Sixth Avenue and Fifth Avenue from Greenwich Village to Central Park. The letter, addressed to DOT Manhattan Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione, calls on the department “to take necessary steps to study and implement Complete Streets infrastructure on Fifth and Sixth Avenues as swiftly as possible.”
Crosswalks, cross sections, and confirming priority issues were all a part of the Quilcene, Washington Complete Streets community design workshop held last week. About 60 people turned out to contribute to the design for a Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) grant to make walking and biking safer along U.S. Highway 101 in downtown Quilcene. Participants were asked to identify spending area priorities for vehicle circulation, speed and passing, sight distance, parking, pedestrian crossings, and pathways for pedestrian and bicycle pathways by affixing three green dots for high priority items and a red dot for the lowest priority item.
Marlborough, Massachusetts’ streets may soon be more accessible to pedestrians, runners, and walkers, as the City Council approved its first Complete Streets policy this fall. Under the new four-page policy, city departments and developers are directed to consistently plan, design, construct, and maintain streets to accommodate all anticipated users. The plan also instructs the city’s Public Works Department and other boards to review projects for Complete Street elements, as well as conduct a baseline inventory of pedestrian and bicycle accommodations in the city and file an annual evaluation as part of the policy.
Palm Beach, Florida kicked off a Complete Streets workshop with two national transportation experts last week. The goal of the workshop, sponsored by the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization, was for towns and cities to eventually incorporate into their transportation policies Complete Streets ideas that account for people, bikes, and cars—not just cars. Former Palm Beach County Commissioner Jeff Koons, who participated in the workshop, encouraged participants to lobby their elected officials to support a possible half-cent sales tax to help pay for Complete Streets concepts.
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