Has your community recently passed a new Complete Streets policy? Send a PDF copy of your policy to us!

Each year the Coalition releases an analysis and ranking of the best Complete Streets policies in the country based on 10 policy elements that were established more than a decade ago. The upcoming 2017 report will be the last one using our old policy elements. Next year, as we prep for the 2018 report, we will be using a brand new framework, released just a few weeks ago, to analyze and rank Complete Streets policies.

Announcements

Tickets on sale! Eighth Annual Complete Streets Dinner — Conveniently scheduled during the 2018 Transportation Research Board meeting, this intimate and fun gathering brings together Complete Streets professionals, policymakers, supporters, and friends to celebrate the successes of the Complete Streets movement in the last year. We are honored to welcome both Keith Benjamin, the Director of Traffic and Transportation for the City of Charleston, and Assistant Commissioner Toks Omishakin of the Tennessee Department of Transportation, as our featured speakers.

This year’s dinner will be held Tuesday, January 9, 2018 from 6:00 PM – 9:00pm EST at Carmine’s in Washington, DC. Reserve your spot at the dinner >>

New report: Complete Streets for Health Equity — We collaborated with the New Orleans-based nonprofit Bike Easy to create a list of performance measures that New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, and jurisdictions around the country can use to maximize the benefit of Complete Streets projects and investments — particularly for the most vulnerable users of the road. The report includes four categories of performance measures to evaluate the success of Complete Streets in these jurisdictions with health equity in mind. Read the full report here >>

Second Consortium Series Award — We are excited to announce that a trio of Colorado cities has won our second-ever Complete Streets Consortium technical assistance. The Cities of Arvada, Aurora, and Westminster applied for and won the award collaboratively, and will together receive a set of three free technical assistance workshops. Each of the winning cities will host one of the workshops, which will be tailored to the region’s specific opportunities and challenges including creating first/last mile connections to new transit stations.

Upcoming webinar: Complete Streets in Canada — This webinar will explore the uptake of the Complete Streets approach in Canada. We will be joined by Nancy Smith Lea, Director of the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation (TCAT) in Ontario, Peter Murphy, an Urban Designer for Quebec City, Quebec, and Ryan Martinson, an Associate at Stantec in Calgary, Alberta. Inspired by the National Complete Streets Coalition, in 2012, TCAT launched the Complete Streets for Canada website to track and promote Complete Streets in Canada, and to provide Canadian-specific resources and research.

Tune in on January 23rd at 1PM EST. Register today >>

Registration open for Intersections: Creating Culturally Complete Streets — Join us in Nashville, TN on April 3-4, 2018 for mobile workshops, interactive panels and breakout discussions about cutting-edge Complete Streets and creative placemaking research, ideas, and practices. The conference will also be an opportunity to meet fellow advocates and practitioners from across the country. Take part in the movement and register today >>

Missed any of our webinars? — Recordings of all the webinars in our Implementation & Equity 201 series are available on our blog, along with links to additional resources. So far, we’ve explored the intersections between Complete Streets and public health, economic development, Vision Zero, walkability, autonomous vehicles, creative placemaking and more.

Additional resources

How metro areas are implementing more and better bicycling and walking projects — Metro areas of all sizes across the country are strategizing, developing, and implementing new ways to improve bicycling and walking in their regions. T4America worked with metro areas across the country to collect and document these stories, ideas, and strategies into this new guidebook.

Multimodal transportation and income equity fit hand-in-glove — One recent study finds that cities offering diverse transportation options have the lowest income inequality, while another study finds that transit systems may begin to struggle as lower income families are pushed away from the city center. These works demonstrate that preserving access to multimodal options for disadvantaged populations is essential for cities’ economies, the viability of their transportation systems, and the wellbeing of families.

Walking while black in Jacksonville, FL — A ProPublica/Florida Times-Union analysis of five years of pedestrian tickets shows there is no strong relationship between where tickets are being issued and where people are being killed. The number of fatal crashes involving pedestrians, in fact, climbed every year from 2012 to 2016, the most recent years for which complete data is available. What the analysis does show is that the pedestrian tickets were disproportionately issued to blacks, almost all of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

America Walks webinar: Walking Towards Justice, Episode 2 — This episode will be explore the devastating impacts that social injustice within our legal system has had on people of color and low-income communities. Using the text The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander as a framework for the conversation, a panel of experts and advocates will discuss discrimination within our criminal justice system and how it intersects with the work (e.g., Vision Zero, safety outreach and education, equitable enforcement, etc.) being done by walkability advocates. Listen in on January 18th at 2PM EST. Register here >>