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Courtesy of Complete the Streets
ELEMENTS OF COMPLETE STREETS POLICIES
1. The Principle
- Complete streets are designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities must be able to safely move along and across a complete street.
- Creating complete streets means changing the policies and practices of transportation agencies.
- A complete streets policy ensures that the entire right of way is routinely designed and operated to enable safe access for all users.
- Transportation agencies must ensure that all road projects result in a complete street appropriate to local context and needs.
2. Elements of a Good Complete Streets Policy
A good complete streets policy:
- Specifies that ‘all users’ includes pedestrians, bicyclists, transit vehicles and users, and motorists, of all ages and abilities.
- Aims to create a comprehensive, integrated, connected network.
- Recognizes the need for flexibility: that all streets are different and user needs will be balanced.
- Is adoptable by all agencies to cover all roads.
- Applies to both new and retrofit projects, including design, planning, maintenance, and operations, for the entire right of way.
- Makes any exceptions specific and sets a clear procedure that requires high-level approval of exceptions.
- Directs the use of the latest and best design standards.
- Directs that complete streets solutions fit in with context of the community.
- Establishes performance standards with measurable outcomes.
2.5 Implementation
An effective complete streets policy should prompt transportation agencies to:
- Restructure their procedures to accommodate all users on every project.
- Re-write their design manuals to encompass the safety of all users.
- Re-train planners and engineers in balancing the needs of diverse users.
- Create new data collection procedures to track how well the streets are serving all users.
Complete Streets Needed in Colorado
One of the biggest challenges bicyclists in Colorado face is that most roads are built incomplete, designed to move just one type of user – motorists. When a street is built complete it is designed to safely accommodate all users including bicyclists, pedestrians, children, motorists, transit users, seniors, and the disabled.
In Colorado, most roads do not have bike lanes and many do not have sidewalks. Hectic intersections form barriers. Busy turning lanes are difficult to cross. Wide lanes promote speeding. The result is that many roads discourage bicycling, as well as walking and access to transit.
Complete streets will lead to more bicycle-friendly roads, which will increase the number of bicyclists, strengthen Colorado tourism, and reduce road maintenance costs due to less wear and tear. Complete streets will also help Colorado comply with federal policies on bicycle and pedestrian design.
Three Colorado cities are using the positive effect of complete streets to lower residents’ transportation costs and improve their health. Colorado Springs, Boulder, and Fort Collins already have complete streets policies, but the rest of the state has yet to adopt this guidance.
In Colorado about 2% of commuters bicycle to work and just over 6% of students bicycle to school as their primary mode of transportation. But when roads are designed to safely accommodate all types of users, bicycle ridership soars. In Boulder, for example, as many as 21% of commuters bicycle to work and 23% of university students bicycle to school.
A statewide example comes from Oregon’s complete streets policy. Oregon increased the number of people who bicycle to work by 45% between 1990 and 2005 (and that’s after adjusting for population growth). This growth rate was more than 2.5 times higher than Colorado’s growth rate with incomplete streets during the same period.
During the months ahead Bicycle
Colorado will partner with other road safety groups, transportation officials, and policy makers in support of complete streets in Colorado. Broad coalitions are generating complete streets policies across the country, and the need in Colorado is clear. Working together we can ensure bicyclists are welcome and feel safe on our public roads. Learn more about Complete Streets at www.CompleteStreets.org
Courtesy of Project for Public Spaces
About the PPS
Transportation Program
Project for Public Spaces has a radical idea--transportation can create great places, not destroy them. We see the vast amount of urban land dedicated to cars, traffic, and parking lots as a huge opportunity to create public spaces that serve community.
"If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic.
If you plan for people and places, you get people and places."
The power of this simple idea is that it reflects basic truths that are rarely acknowledged. One such truth is that more traffic and road capacity are not the inevitable result of growth. They are in fact the product of very deliberate choices that we have made to shape our communities around the private automobile. We as a society have the ability to make different choices--starting with the decision to design our streets as comfortable places for people.
Thankfully, over the past ten years, a growing number of neighborhood groups, cities, states, and even national transportation agencies in the United States and Canada have started to demand something better. PPS is showing them the way forward, helping communities realize how transportation can support their visions for their future, and helping agencies and engineers deliver on that vision.
Downtown streets can become destinations worth visiting, not just thruways to and from the workplace. Transit stops and stations can make commuting by rail or bus a pleasure. Neighborhood streets can be places where parents can feel safe letting their children play, and commercial strips can be redeveloped into grand boulevards, safe for walking and cycling, allowing for faster-moving through traffic as well as slower-paced local traffic.
For years we've helped this vision take shape around North America, by helping communities envision places, training transportation agencies in Placemaking and Context Sensitive Solutions, even helping develop policy and long-range plans integrating transportation and land use for State DOTs.
We also are constantly learning from the great cities and regions of the world. Barcelona has built boulevards and Ramblas that give pedestrians priority over the auto. Paris has developed a neighborhood traffic calming program to rival that of any city anywhere. London charges congestion fees for vehicles entering the city center, successfully reducing traffic levels and funding an aggressive program to improve transit. Bogotá now boasts a world-class bus rapid transit system and has established a mandate to eliminate private auto use during the morning rush hour by 2015.
North American communities are discovering new solutions to the problems of transportation.
Not so long ago, ideas like these were considered preposterous in most North American communities. Transit stops were simply places to wait. Streets had been surrendered to traffic for so long that we hardly considered them to be public spaces at all. But now we are slowly getting away from this narrow perception of "transportation as conduit for cars" and beginning to think of "transportation as place."
PPS sees signs of this everywhere we go. North American communities are discovering new solutions to the problems of transportation, each in their own way. In Tucson, Arizona, it means revitalizing downtown by creating a network of walkable streets and alleys that connect major public destinations. In New Jersey, it means helping towns solve transportation problems by kicking the habit of sprawl-inducing land use. In New Hampshire's North Country, it means preserving the small town sense of place by calming traffic and reviving public spaces that have been overwhelmed by car-centric development.
PPS is helping California's San Mateo County relieve gridlock and increase transit ridership by transforming auto-dominated downtown streets into pedestrian-friendly public spaces.
These projects are evidence that we can redesign our transportation networks to reflect their true importance as public spaces and supporters of our vision for our towns and cities. We are poised to create a future where priority is given to the appropriate mode, whether pedestrian, bicycle, transit or automobile. To be sure, cars have their place, but the newfound ease of walking and "alternative transportation modes" can make driving less prevalent in most towns and cities. As a result, we will see significantly more people on the streets, which will turn into public forums where neighbors and friends can connect with each other. The street itself will fulfill the critical "town square" function that is missing in most communities today.
That may sound like a far cry from where we stand now, but at PPS, we are helping these ideas take root today. From suburban New Jersey to the high-tech corridor of California's San Mateo County, communities large and small all over the U.S. have stepped forward to say the old way of doing things isn't acceptable any more.
Three simple rules to make transportation a positive force in the public realm.
Project for Public Spaces has a radical idea--transportation can create great places, not destroy them. We see the vast amount of urban land dedicated to cars, traffic, and parking lots as a huge opportunity to create public spaces that serve community. Transportation can be the handmaiden of this transformation—by redeveloping facilities from highways to boulevards, from parking lots to mixed-use transit oriented development, and from nowhere to someplace. But we must follow some simple rules. These include:
Rule One: Stop Planning for Speed
Speed kills sense of place. Cities and town centers are destinations, not raceways. Commerce needs traffic--foot traffic. You can't buy a dress from a car. Even foot traffic speeds up in the presence of fast-moving cars. Access, not automobiles, should be the priority in city centers. Don't ban cars, but remove the presumption in their favor. People first!
Stop planning for speed by removing the presumption in favor of cars.
Rule Two: Start Planning for Public Outcomes
Cars were first introduced into cities as a public health measure--removing the dirt and filth of a transportation system based on raw horsepower, in the literal sense of the word. Cars also allowed us to separate people from the pollution of mills and factories, another public benefit. Great transportation facilities, such as Grand Central Terminal in New York City, grand boulevards, cozy side streets, rail-trails, the wide sidewalks of the Champs Elysées, are transportation "improvements" that actually improve the public realm. "Right-sizing" road projects in cities and suburbs can help increase developable land, create open space, and reconnect communities to their neighbors, a waterfront, or park. They can reduce household dependency on the automobile, allowing children to walk to school, connecting commercial districts to downtowns, and helping build healthier lifestyles by increasing the potential to walk or cycle. Think public benefit, not just private convenience.
Rule Three: Think of Transportation as Public Space
The road, the parking lot, the transit terminal--these places can serve more than one mode (cars) and one purpose (movement). Sidewalks are the urban arterials of cities--make them wide, well lit, stylish and accommodating with benches, outdoor cafes and public art. Roads can be shared spaces with pedestrian refuges, bike lanes, on-street parking etc. Parking lots can become public markets on weekends. Even major urban arterials can be retrofitted to provide for dedicated bus lanes, well-designed bus stops that serve as gathering places, and multi-modal facilities for bus rapid transit or other forms of travel. Roads are places too!
Transportation--the process of going to a place--can be wonderful if we rethink the idea of transportation itself. If we remember that transportation is the journey, but community is always our goal.
Transportation professionals have just as much reason to object to decisions that create automobile dependent land use patterns as they would to the closure of a highway lane or a reduction in transit service, since all result in reduced access.
Transportation planners and engineers receive professional rewards for implementing capacity expansion projects, but are seldom rewarded for finding ways to avoid the need for such projects.
Sustainable planning requires that transportation professionals shift from being traffic engineers concerned only with vehicle flow, into “public space architects” concerned with balancing diverse and often conflicting uses of road environments.
Sustainable transportion planning avoids language biased in favor of automobile travel.
Smart Growth strategies that minimize urbanized area growth by providing incentives for infill, compact, mixed use, senior, pedestrian, bicycle and transit friendly development could save Colorado's taxpayers billions in highway spending.
With a mature Highway system, it is better to increase transportation diversity and encourage efficiency rather than continuing to expand Highway Capacity.
Courtesy of Project for Public Spaces
PPS Partners with Bass Foundation on Far-Reaching Transportation Initiative
Earlier this year, the Bass Foundation partnered with PPS to define "how" and "what" new resources and technical assistance are needed, in the long-term, to help transportation planners design and plan roads differently. This newly-formed resource team, led by Gary Toth and supported by a small coalition of regional DOTs, will be oriented towards helping agencies deliver their programs, and solve congestion problems without major investment projects which most states can no longer afford.
PPS is assembling resources to assist DOTs in the following areas: Integrating transportation and land use planning; Collaborative interaction and partnering with communities; Context Sensitive Solutions; Placemaking to support good transportation outcomes; and Ecologically sustainable, low impact solutions for highway roadsides and drainage.
For more information, please email Gary Toth, Director of Transportation Initiatives.
Back to Basics in Transportation Planning:
Rediscovering our roots can solve 21st Century traffic woes
by Gary Toth, the new Director of Transportation Initiatives at PPS and a veteran of 34 years with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, reflects on how we lost our way in traffic planning and what we can do to get back on track.
I started at the New Jersey Department of Transportation in 1973 right out of college as a civil engineer trainee. For the first twenty years of my career as a transportation planner, I bought into the prevailing belief of the profession that the solution to congestion was to build more and bigger roads. We felt we were not doing our jobs properly unless enough lanes were added to ensure free flowing traffic 24/7/365.
I was part of a profession that for five decades viewed its mission as simply accommodating the demands of traffic, whether on local streets or on state and national highways. The quality of life in communities and the condition of the environment were someone else's business; our job was to move cars and trucks as smoothly and rapidly as possible.
Gradually my faith in this "wider, straighter, faster" paradigm of traffic planning began to change. This occurred while I was in charge of a new unit at the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) that had been created to meet with communities, business owners, public agencies and other community stakeholders to seek their support for various road projects. We were supposed to reduce community resistance, which was beginning to delay and even cancel projects. But as time went on, it became clear to me that the real point of transportation projects should be building successful communities and fostering economic prosperity.
How did we get into this jam?
Prior to the introduction of the automobile, Americans' concept of what constituted a good road had a vastly different meaning from today. Serving the community and creating an efficient and livable pattern of development were essential values at the center of street design. In short, transportation was fully integrated into land use planning.
The growing popularity of automobiles after 1910 created pressure for the federal government to become more directly involved in financing roads. Spurred on by cries of "Get farmers out of the mud," Congress passed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which made continuous funding available for states to make road improvements. Motorists and other organized interests began to apply intense pressure to build more highways. In the 1930s many American officials visited the German Autobahn network and returned with a sense of urgency that we must create a national system of high-speed highways. This ultimately led to federal legislation in 1944 to establish the Interstate System and in 1956 to fund it, which ignited the great road building era of the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
Today, it is fashionable to vilify the transportation profession for ignoring the negative effects of large-scale road building on our communities. However, two men at the top of the transportation field during the years the Interstate highway system was shaped--Thomas H. MacDonald, chief of the federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), and his top aide, Herbert S. Fairbank--warned that thoughtless planning and improperly placed roads: "will become more and more of an encumbrance to the city's functions and an all too durable reminder of planning that was bad." They recognized that a shift of population to the suburbs was beginning to take a toll on cities.
Unfortunately, the federal government ignored MacDonald and Fairbank's vision of connecting highway development to a broader regional planning approach. As late as 1947, at the annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway Officials (now AASHTO), MacDonald urged his colleagues to do whatever they could to reverse politicians' refusal to subsidize mass transportation. Repeatedly, however, Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower along with Congress ignored these sensible recommendations for an integrated and balanced transportation network in the various federal highway acts that were enacted.
Starting in the 1950s, the transportation industry mobilized in an unprecedented way to deliver a mandate for a new generation of highways that would eliminate hassles and obstacles to the rapid flow of traffic. Planning in the U.S. became dominated by transportation engineers, while citizens, advocacy groups and planners in other fields saw their influence decline. The transportation profession was remarkably successful in convincing two generations of politicians, developers, construction industries, special interest groups, and the public about how things should be done. With blinders firmly attached, the transportation planners and the nation at large ignored mounting evidence of the unintended consequences of this huge road-building campaign.
The transportation profession "hits the wall"
By the early 1990s, when the Interstate Highway System-one of the biggest construction projects in human history-was essentially completed, congestion in urban areas was still growing worse and community opposition was stronger than ever to new road projects. Within the transportation profession, there was a dawning recognition that something was innately wrong with the way we think about and design highways.
Yet not knowing any other way to operate, the transportation profession continued to plan new road projects in the same old way: attempting to meet peak demand according to a formula based on maintaining the free flow of traffic at the thirtieth busiest hour of the entire year.
When the inevitable resistance from affected communities arose, state DOTs found that invoking the "national interest", which worked so well during the Interstate era to override community objections, was no longer effective in pushing through the projects. By the 1990s, citizen opposition was able to bring many projects to a standstill.
Meanwhile, evidence was mounting that the wider, straighter, and faster approach was not solving the problem. The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), in their 2005 Urban Mobility Report, revealed that over the last two decades of the 20th century, congestion indicators had spiraled out of control. The hours each year a motorist spends in congestion had quadrupled.
This was occurring because of the way street and road networks were being planned. Spread out development made possible by the new highway capacity was creating congestion faster than transportation agencies could widen or replace failing highways. Furthermore, mass transit could not serve the new sprawling suburbs and street design made biking and walking all but impossible. This all caused vehicle trips and vehicle miles to explode at a rate many times faster than population growth. Transportation professionals and state DOTs watched these problems worsen but stood aside and did nothing in the belief that their job was building roads and that land use planning was someone else's responsibility.
Now it has become clear with each new fiscal year that construction costs for adding new capacity to roads is escalating sharply at exactly the same time our aging transportation infrastructure demands more and more attention. And in most states, revenue sources have been flat for almost a decade. State legislatures are afraid to mention the "T" word-- taxes. Many roads and bridges built in the highway boom years between the 1940s and 1960s have aged to the point of needing major repairs or replacement, creating a towering backlog of Fix-It-First projects. All of these factors make it far less likely that even the most determined DOTs can build their way out of congestion.
As congestion has worsened in a transportation system focused on high speed travel, so have other social problems. The skyrocketing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the US is a major factor in gas consumption and CO2 emissions that spur global warming. Our nation's public health indicators are also taking a nosedive. The National Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 25 years ago, only two states had obesity rates above 10%, and none had rates above 15%. Today, in a startling turnaround, no state has less than a 10% obesity rate, and only one is below 15%. Twenty-eight states--more than half the union--are above 20%, and one is above 25%.
The CDC classifies this rapid deterioration of public health as an "Inactivity Epidemic", and warns us that our increasing lack of fitness brings major health problems in addition to obesity: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, increased symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as poorer development and maintenance of bones and muscles. While some still dispute our transportation system's role in this widening health crisis, new studies linking sprawl and obesity are accumulating.
How can we get out of this jam?
1. Target the "right" capital improvement projects first:
The first step is to recognize that transportation decisions make a huge impact on land use and community planning-and vice versa. Major investments in roads should be pursued only in communities and regions with effective land use plans in place, which will protect the public investment in new highway capacity. With funds for expanding our road system now at a premium, we can no longer afford to invest in areas whose inadequate land use practices will mean the new roads are soon overburdened. Taxpayers deserve to know that their money will be spent in ways that solve our transportation problems-not in creating new problems. The transportation profession itself needs to accept that road projects carry significant social and environmental consequences. Transportation professionals need to heed Thomas MacDonald's and Herbert Fairbank's advice from the 1930s: "Freeway location should be coordinated with housing and city planning authorities; railroad, bus, and truck interests; air transportation and airport officials; and any other agencies, groups, and interests that may affect the future shape of the city." (Quote from THE GENIE IN THE BOTTLE: The Interstate System and Urban Problems, 1939-1957 by Richard F. Weingroff)
2. Make Placemaking and far-sighted land-use planning central to transportation decisions:
Traffic planners and public officials need to foster land use planning at the community level, which supports instead of overloads a state's transportation network. This includes creating more attractive places that people will want to visit in both existing developments and new ones. A strong sense of place benefits the overall transportation system. Great Places - popular spots with a good mix of people and activities, which can be comfortably reached by foot, bike and perhaps transit as well as cars - put little strain on the transportation system. Poor land-use planning, by contrast, generates thousands of unnecessary vehicle-trips, creating dysfunctional roads, which further worsens the quality of the places. Transportation professionals can no longer pretend that land use is not our business. Road projects that were not integrated into land use planning have created too many negative impacts to ignore.
3. Re-envision single-use zoning:
We also must shift planning regulations that treat schools, grocery stores, affordable housing and shops as undesirable neighbors. The misguided logic of current zoning codes calls for locating these amenities as far away from residential areas as possible. Locating these essential services along busy state and local highways creates needless traffic and gangs local traffic atop of commuting and regional traffic, thus choking the capacity of the road system.
4. Get more mileage out of our roads:
The 19th and early 20th Century practice of creating connected road networks, still found in many beloved older neighborhoods, can help us beat 21st century congestion. Mile for mile, a finely-woven dense grid of connected streets has much more carrying capacity than a sparse, curvilinear tangle of unconnected cul-de-sacs, which forces all traffic out to the major highways. Unconnected street networks, endemic to post-World War II suburbs, do almost nothing to promote mobility.
5. View streets as places:
Streets take up as much as a third of a community's land. Yet, under planning policies of the past 70 years, people have given up their rights to this public property. While streets were once a place where we stopped for conversation and children played, they are now the exclusive domain of cars. Even the sidewalks along highways and high-speed local streets feel inhospitable.But there is a new movement to look at streets in the broader context of communities (see the Federal Highway Administration's website on Context-Sensitive Solutions.) It's really a rather simple idea-streets need to be designed in a way that induces traffic speeds appropriate for that particular context. Freeways should remain high-speed roads but on other roads and streets we need to take into account that these are places for people as well as conduits for cars.
6. Think outside the lane:
Last but not least, the huge costs of eliminating traffic jams at hundreds of locations throughout a state will allow for only a few congestion hot spots to be fixed by big engineering projects each year. That means that most communities must wait decades or even a century for a solution to their problems unless we adopt a new approach that incorporates land use planning, community planning and alternative modes of transportation to address ever increasing volumes of traffic.
A new approach to transportation for a new century
The transportation profession responded to a mandate from government officials in the post-World War II era to build a new generation of highways for public mobility and national defense. They should be commended for a job well done. A new generation of solutions is needed for the 21st Century, however, and this well-organized and well-trained profession should apply its talents to help us adapt to these new realities. We need a new vision of transportation that truly improves our mobility, sustains our communities, protects our environment and helps restore our physical fitness and health.
The transportation profession can no longer respond to mounting levels of congestion as well as community and environmental dilemmas by trying to widen existing roads or build new ones. New highways are now packed with cars almost as soon as they open. And today there is simply not the money available for that kind of large-scale road building. Most states can't even keep up with the backlog of repair projects.
When I was at NJDOT, we came to realize the 1950s were long past and that we needed a new approach to meet the needs of our citizens. So we began collaborating with the public on solutions that took into account the whole context of communities being served by a particular road--the approach known as Context Sensitive Solutions. Like most people we initially believed that Americans were in love with the automobile and would demand we continue to provide them with bigger, faster roads separated from shopping and neighborhoods. While we did find this response in some communities, we were surprised by how many more communities firmly supported better land-use and community planning.
Americans may always love their automobiles, but that does not mean we want to spend all day stuck inside them. Transportation systems which afford Americans the choice of getting to places without using their cars actually offer more freedom than those where people are solely dependent on the auto to get anywhere. People easily understand this, and can see that a transportation network catering exclusively to cars has harmed our communities, compromised our health, fueled the environmental crisis and made us dependent on foreign oil.
There is nothing un-American about planning communities as a whole, and acknowledging that roads are just one of the elements that create a livable place. This was the common sense that guided our communities until at least 1920. While pre-20th Century community planners were by no means perfect, they did create places where transportation was integrated into broader public hopes. The roads and bridges in these areas were built to foster economic development and quality of life in the community, not to hamper it.
If we are to really embrace the concept of healthy, livable communities that serve a diverse population and that make choices for mobility a priority, then we must integrate our transportation planning with other goals and we must design our roads for all users. In short, we must capitalize on the wisdom of our roots.
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