New Orleans

Announcing a new resource on health equity and Complete Streets

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The City of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish have made great strides in building out their bicycle networks and encouraging more people to bike, but much more work needs to be done to prioritize low-income areas, communities of color, and places with high rates of crashes and chronic diseases. To help achieve this goal, the National Complete Streets Coalition is pleased to release our latest report, Complete Streets for Health Equity: An Evaluation of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish.

Complete Streets

Complete Streets for Health Equity: An Evaluation of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish

The National Complete Streets Coalition, in partnership with Bike Easy, is excited to release Complete Streets for Health Equity: An Evaluation of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. This report establishes an approach to evaluate Complete Streets programs with a focus on health equity for the City of New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, and other jurisdictions around the … Continued

Complete Streets

After the ordinance: Implementing Complete Streets strategies in New Orleans

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Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, LA
Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans after Complete Streets improvements. Photo by Jennifer Ruley.

With one of the best Complete Streets policies in the nation and champions for multimodal transportation on the City Council and public agencies, New Orleans, LA is taking concrete steps to build a post-Katrina transportation network that’s safer, more equitable and more fully connected than before.

The city’s most recent addition to its list of accomplishments is it’s new Complete Streets Advisory Committee. This month the City finalized the membership of the new Committee, which will make sure public agencies and processes work together to create a transportation system that works for all residents, no matter how they get around. The Committee’s first tasks include reviewing local subdivision regulations and deciding how to measure the success of Complete Streets implementation.

Complete Streets Local Leaders Council

City Councilmember Kristin Palmer on smart growth and resilience in New Orleans, LA

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Kristin Palmer had long been interested in smart growth strategies, but smart growth really became a focal point of her first term on City Council in 2010, as New Orleans still struggled to rebuild five years after Hurricane Katrina.

“When you’re trying to rebuild from nothing, from ground zero, what are the things that make sense when you come back and rebuild? Access to public transportation and economic corridors was really part of that success,” says Palmer. “If you had access to grocery stores and you had a walkable community, and you could get to the resources you needed, those are the communities that rebuilt faster and better.”

Local Leaders Council

Smart growth news – January 4, 2012

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Transit tax break falls, driving benefit goes up
WHYY (Penn.), January 3, 2012
Geoff Anderson, president and CEO of Smart Growth for America, says the public transit benefit was briefly on par with breaks to pay to park at work. That benefit went up this year from $230 to $240. “I think everything is sort of under budget scrutiny right now,” says Anderson. What we can afford is “certainly a legitimate question, but then I’d ask it about subsidies for all the different forms of transportation.”

Smart-growth trend shifting focus away from sprawl
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (N.Y.), January 3, 2012
Shifting demographic and economic factors, coupled with a state policy that encourages smart-growth principles, signal a shift in the decades-old debate over suburban sprawl.

New Orleans: Federal Housing, Environmental Policies Clash
City Limits (N.Y.), January 4, 2012
Obama is trying to reverse that legacy with HUD’s Sustainable Communities initiative—which takes a cross-agency approach to build more cohesive, connected regions wherein transit development coordinates with housing development and job growth—and the Choice Neighborhoods program for transforming isolated public housing developments into integrated, mixed-income neighborhoods.

Complete Streets