The American Planning Association and the National Complete Streets Coalition have launched a research project on complete streets. The effort is intended to transform community planning, urban design, and engineering street design practices to better meet the needs of all forms of vehicular and non-vehicular transportation — cars, transit, pedestrians, (including pedestrians with disabilities), and bicyclists.
For too long, our states, cities, counties, and towns have built miles of streets and roads that are safe and comfortable only for motor vehicle travel. Sprawling communities have become dangerous and inconvenient places to walk, bicycle, or take transit, leaving little choice for getting around. A recent federal survey found that about one-quarter of walking trips take place on roads without sidewalks or shoulders, and bike lanes are available for only about five percent of bicycle trips. While nine percent of all trips are made by foot or bicycle, more than 13 percent of all traffic fatalities are bicyclists or pedestrians.
Close to 5,000 pedestrians and bicyclists die each year on U.S. roads. Unfortunately, these roads have characteristics with which we are all too familiar — a lack of sidewalks or crosswalks, lanes too narrow to share with bicyclists, little or no room for transit riders, and no accommodation for people with disabilities — essentially leaving us with incomplete streets.
Complete Streets represents a paradigm shift in traditional road construction philosophy. Instead of a project-by-project struggle to accommodate bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly practices, complete streets policies require all road construction and improvement projects to begin by evaluating how the right-of-way serves all who use it. The Federal Highway Administration endorsed this approach in 2000 but it has yet to be widely implemented. Therefore, this project presents an opportunity to help bring more complete streets to communities nationwide by providing information on best practices.
For more information, please contact us at completestreets@planning.org.
The National Complete Streets Coalition, APA's project partner on the best practices manual, recently completed an inventory of 80 complete streets policies at the state and local level as part of their work with AARP on the report, Planning Complete Streets for an Aging America.
APA is preparing a Best Practices Manual on Complete Streets. Several states and local governments have already adopted a variety of laws and internal policies to achieve complete streets, but there is no consensus yet on the best way to achieve this goal. The manual will be a valuable resource and toolkit for key decision makers, planners, and engineers. It is anticipated to include existing complete streets policies, advantages and disadvantages of various approaches, cases studies, and recommendations on the best approaches to complete streets policies, planning, and design principles. The way complete streets policies interact with context-sensitive design and other related initiatives will also be addressed. The manual will be developed in cooperation with members of the National Complete Streets Coalition, the American Planning Association, Public Health Law and Policy, researchers at University of California, Davis and Portland State University, and representatives from communities with a strong interest in complete streets.
The Best Practices Manual on Complete Streets will be in the form of a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report. The premier planning research service since 1949, PAS provides more than a thousand planning agencies, consultants, and educational institutions with access to the most innovative planning practices across the nation. The printed manual will be automatically distributed to all PAS subscribing planning agencies and consultants across the nation. Organizations within the National Complete Streets Coalition network are committed to widely disseminating the report to members and communities nationwide. The manual will also be available through the Complete Streets Implementation Assistance Program. It will serve as a training manual for various face-to-face and online training opportunities at a wide variety of venues.
The manual is scheduled to be available in January 2010.
APA has compiled a list of resources on aspects of complete streets, from aging populations to children, health aspects, and transit.
An integral part of the proposed Best Practices Manual on Complete Streets is the expert scoping symposium. APA often relies on scoping symposia as a way to get a project off to the right start.
At the June 30–July 1, 2008, symposium, experts on complete streets convened to flesh out content and critical subject matter to include in the best practices manual. The group scoped research goals, content, and format over the two-day event, and shared knowledge of resources to clarify a common understanding of the mission.
Invited participants included academic researchers and practitioners from around the country working in transportation planning, transportation engineering, and related fields in the public sector, private sector, and nonprofit organizations:
The scoping symposium was funded by a grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.
E-mail questions and comments to completestreets@planning.org.
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