Last week we brought together representatives from three of the top ten communities with high scoring policies in our recent report, The Best Complete Streets Policies of 2018. They shared their insights on the process of passing a strong Complete Streets policy and answered viewers’ questions. A recording of the webinar is now available. You can also read the brief recap below.
The National Complete Streets Coalition has released their annual evaluation of new Complete Streets policies. This year, a new and improved grading framework set a higher bar for communities by emphasizing equity and implementation. Download the full report—The Best Complete Streets Policies of 2018—for the full ranking and community profiles.
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.
For the second meeting of the Safe Streets, Smart Cities Academy, teams from Huntsville, AL and Pittsburgh, PA traveled to meet their peers in Durham, NC. During the meeting, teams honed in on next steps for their safety demonstration projects and talked about how to define success and measure the outcomes from their demos. Teams also worked to strengthen skills in community engagement and collaboration across sectors and jurisdictions.
Smart Growth America and the Governors’ Institute on Community Design worked with state departments of transportation to question and assess their underlying assumptions that lead many states to over built, expensive highway solutions for every transportation problem. The following memos are the outcome of that work, which delve into seven common areas of reform that we identified.
Join us for a webinar on March 13th about how two communities are addressing pedestrian safety in ways that suit their needs. This is the latest installment in our monthly webinar series Implementation & Equity 201: The Path Forward to Complete Streets.
In the wake of Dangerous by Design making headlines from coast to coast, staff from the key Senate committee responsible for the largest portion of federal transportation policy invited us to come to Capitol Hill and explain the problem in more detail, and tell them what Congress can and should be doing to end this epidemic of preventable pedestrian deaths.