At the National Complete Streets Coalition, our success truly results from the efforts of our coalition. We’ll be showcasing our Partners’ work and what drives their commitment to the Complete Streets movement. This month, we spoke with Tom von Schrader, PE, LEED AP, principal at SvR Design Company. SvR is a Platinum Partner and an active Steering Committee member.
What SvR Design Company’s mission?
Our mission at SvR is to create places that perform. We design, engineer, and plan high-value investments for our clients that meet triple-bottom-line performance metrics. Based in Seattle, our team of landscape architects, civil engineers, and mobility planners practice nationally serving to provide sustainable solutions that balance and maximize benefits across a range of infrastructural systems: biologic, hydrologic, metabolic, social, and mobility. This systems approach to design and engineering comes from our founding DNA, which is always multi-disciplinary, seeking integrated, high-performance solutions.
Why does your organization support Complete Streets and the Coalition?
In addition to private sites, housing developments, parks and utilities, we have also continuously worked in the right-of-way. As planners and engineers, we often see projects that make the built environment less safe for vulnerable users in the right-of-way. For us, that’s unethical.
That’s why we’re so supportive of Complete Streets. The work of the National Complete Streets Coalition and its partners is an effort to re-balance and modernize the way the right-of-way is allocated to different uses. For us, this builds on a core concern of our business: sustainability. For us, sustainability isn’t just about environmental concerns, but also social and economic considerations; the classic three-legged stool. Our work designing and promoting Complete Streets fit squarely into that framework for us. Of course Complete Streets are the environmentally responsible thing to do: from toxic stormwater runoff, climate change, and peak oil, the impacts of an automobile-centric transportation system have been profound for our ecological systems.
Complete Streets are also the right thing to do socially—promoting health, reducing inequities, and encouraging greater social capital—and economically. In the Seattle metropolitan region, for example, we spend nearly $38 billion annually on household transportation costs, and nearly all of that money flows out of our region and overseas. By building transportation options that keep the local economy intact, we’re helping to support and create green jobs close to home while keeping all our region’s residents rolling.
What kinds of Complete Streets projects has SvR been working on lately?
While we love working with municipalities that have Complete Streets ordinances (and love helping them develop ordinances), two of our current projects that are prime examples of how Complete Streets thinking can provide multiple benefits for a community, even without this policy direction.
The first is Winslow Way in Bainbridge Island, Washington. This main street had significantly deteriorated utilities under the road necessitating a complete re-construction of the right-of-way. By accommodating all users and approaching the streetscape from a systems perspective, we created a high-value streetscape that everyone will be proud of.
The second is Paso Robles, California’s 21st Street Complete Street. Again we were able to combine Complete Street principles and green stormwater design to create a terrific, community-inspired vision for this street. For 21st Street, we had the additional challenge of attempting to accommodate the flows from a culverted stream in the central median of a boulevard.
How are you working to advance the Complete Streets movement?
The first way that we are working to advance the Complete Streets movement is by working to design compelling Complete Streets for communities across the United States; we not only design specific projects but also help cities to define policy, funding, and implementation targets around Complete Streets. In addition, Tom von Schrader, a principal with SvR, is a Complete Streets Workshop Instructor.
When working with our clients to implement Complete Streets, we are looking at some innovative ways of funding projects in the right of way. By leveraging funds for, say, water quality (green infrastructure), which in some regions are far more prevalent than mobility funds, we are able to implement Complete Streets strategies which otherwise would not have been funded. For example, the 21st Street project described above, was funded initially through the local water board and has now successfully applied for nearly $1 million in funding from the Strategic Growth Council.