Last week the arts & culture team caught up with this year’s State of the Art (SOTA) Transportation Training participants to learn how arts organizations and transportation agencies in these communities are successfully collaborating to address unique transportation challenges. We’re also releasing the DIY Toolkit so that you can hold SOTA Transportation Trainings in your own community.
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.
This month on Building Better Communities with Transit we chat with Colin Parent, Executive Director of Circulate San Diego, an advocacy organization that promotes public and active transportation in tandem with sustainable growth. As Colin notes, much of the renewed interest and support for transit and transit-oriented development is being driven by one thing: the housing crisis.
Do you know a real estate developer, investor, or company creating great walkable places and demonstrating exemplary public leadership to advance smart growth development? If so, nominate them for the 2019 LOCUS National Leadership Awards.
State DOTs founded to build highways are now in charge of building and operating a much broader array of transportation infrastructure and services than ever before. But to build more cost-effective projects that meet modern mobility challenges and broader economic and environmental goals, state agencies will have to reassess the assumptions that so often drive them in the wrong directions.
Although state DOTs were largely created to build highways, they are now responsible for moving people and goods safely and efficiently across multiple modes—bike, walk, bus, trains, ferries, and cars. But to do a better job of meeting all these diverse needs and provide a multimodal transportation system that supports economic growth and livable communities, changes to their policies, internal processes, and agency culture are required.
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.
Designing the commercial corridors where we live, work, and shop to move high volumes of cars as quickly as possible isn’t just dangerous. It also has severe consequences for health, economic viability, and equity along these corridors. We collaborated with the Urban Land Institute on a new research report that measures the impact of unsafe, unhealthy corridor conditions; examines how common these conditions are across the country; and digs into what can be done to change this trend.
The most productive state departments of transportation are those that have come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast all the time is hard to square with most of their other stated priorities, whether improved safety, more mobility, or reduced costs.