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.
Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States. That’s more than 13 people per day, or one person every hour and 46 minutes. It’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing—with no survivors—every single month. In the past decade, the … Continued
Last week, during the 2019 Transportation Research Board meeting, the National Complete Streets Coalition hosted the Ninth Annual Complete Streets Dinner in Washington, DC. We were joined by over 70 Complete Streets partners, advocates, supporters, and friends who came together to share a meal, get to know each other, and celebrate an eventful year at the Coalition.
This year, the Complete Streets team did lots of reading. Check out the Complete Streets related articles, books, and creative content that we loved in 2018. This is the first installment of Director’s Note, a new series giving you an inside look at what we are thinking about at the National Complete Streets Coalition.
The National Complete Streets Coalition recently worked with 35 transportation and public health professionals from the Denver region on Complete Streets policy adoption and implementation in a suburban context. In the six months since our final workshop, the three participating cities have launched cross-departmental and cross-jurisdictional working groups to develop custom Complete Streets ordinances.