What is NelsonNygaard’s mission? What services do you offer?
NelsonNygaard is a transportation planning and engineering firm. For the past 24 years, we have focused on helping to create ecologically sustainable, socially equitable, and economically vibrant communities. Transportation is not end in itself but a means by which communities achieve their larger vision. We do work all over the world, with a focus on North America. We have five main offices in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and New York. We are also working with non-governmental organizations in developing countries or rapidly motorizing countries, to maintain walkability and bikeability so that motorization does not damage the local economy, quality of life, and environment.
Why does your organization support Complete Streets and the Coalition?
One of our engineers, Michael Moule, is an original Complete Streets Workshop instructor. We have always supported Complete Streets as an organization, and it was past time for us to join the Coalition. We see ourselves as a partner with the Coalition, and our support is not just financial but also through activities and projects as well. For example, we were recently selected to develop a Complete Streets Policy Guidebook for the Kansas City region, with the Coalition on our project team. Complete Streets is part of our mission – it is everything we do. We have a Complete Streets purpose. We have always been a firm that worked to ensure the transportation system does not detract from the community but instead builds community and cities.
What kinds of projects have you been doing lately?
All of our projects have a connection to Complete Streets, including pedestrian and bicycle planning and design, design of multimodal streets, innovative parking strategies, and many services related to transit.
One of our recent award-winning projects, the San Francisco Better Streets Plan (.pdf), developed a set of unified design standards for each major street type in the city. This design toolkit can then be applied as part of future street maintenance and multimodal corridor plans, with the goal of improving the streetscape, pedestrian safety, and sustainability of San Francisco’s streets.
A couple of years ago, we crafted the Circulation Element for Santa Monica’s General Plan (.pdf), specifying a provision of better facilities for bicycling, walking, and transit in order to have dense development without any new peak period motor vehicle trips. We have since been working on several projects to implement the Circulation Element including several area plans, parking analyses and strategies, and the Santa Monica Bike Action Plan.
How are you working to advance the Complete Streets movement?
Everything we do is related to Complete Streets whether it is through the Coalition or our clients. Our work goes beyond high-level policy and focuses on the DNA of how cities make decisions about designing and managing transportation systems, correcting all the ingrained biases toward the car. For example, implementing Complete Streets requires rewriting street design manuals so that Complete Streets are the default. In existing funding formulas, a person riding a full bus is typically valued at 1/60th of a person driving a car, so we seek to make sure that transportation dollars are spent to benefit people equitably, not just vehicles.
We specialize in getting down into the weeds of transportation policy to make sure Complete Streets is not merely a policy that comes from above but also arises from the day-to-day practice of traffic engineering.