Context Sensitive Solutions

What is "Context Sensitive Solutions?"

Why Transportation Planning is The Most Important
Planning That Happens in a Community

What is "Context Sensitive Solutions"?
Context sensitive solutions (CSS), also known as context sensitive design (CSD) and Thinking Beyond the Pavement (TBTP), is a new approach to transportation planning that recognizes that transportation has wide societal impacts and is not merely the practice of engineering. CSS is being pioneered by a number of State Departments of Transportation -- with the blessing and support of the Federal Highway Administration and transportation professional organizations. The emerging national-consensus definition of context sensitive solutions is:

"...a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders to develop a transportation facility that fits its physical setting, and preserves scenic, aesthetic, historic and environmental resources, while maintaining safety and mobility."

The qualities of a project produced by CSS, and the characteristics of the process that yields such projects have also been identified and are generally accepted by DOTs. This new approach questions some of the most fundamental assumptions of the culture of road building, and requires engineerss and community activists alike to reinvent how they think about transportation. It recognizes that transportation planners are community builders, and that the public has an important role to play.

Why Transportation Planning is The Most Important Planning That Happens in a Community.
Transportation is the most potent shaper of urban form, land use, environmental quality, community cohesion, and quality of life. Wow! All of that? Indeed. From the time the first market grew up around the first crossroads, from the time the first boat landing stimulated the development of a port city -- through the construction of the Interstate Highway System and up to the present time -- the planning, construction and use of transportation facilities have shaped the human, built and natural environments more forcefully than any other human endeavor. Inevitably, then, transportation investment decisions are broad, not technical, decisions. They are value-laden. They pose issues of choice and public policy -- particularly in the earliest stages when the most fundamental decisions are made -- where to put the road; whether it is a highway or a transit line that will be built.

Who This Site is For.
This web site is for transportation professionals and their customers -- particularly those who are not yet familiar with CSS or whose state transportation agencies have not yet turned to this new approach. This web site is intended as a starting point for: engineers and other transportation professionals, communities, businesses, institutions and residents who have a stake in transportation planning and in specific transportation projects. "Links and Reading" connect to many more -- and more-detailed and technical -- resources for those who want more information. All parts of this site are written in layman's language and are addressed to both audiences.

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