The Long Beach Convention Center, site of Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2012 / Photo: PPS

It is hard to believe that it has already been six weeks since we convened Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2012. The conference inspired a multitude of ideas, forged new partnerships, and reinforced existing ones. The tone was mostly upbeat; however, owing to the frustration of those who have been calling for change for years if not decades, sometimes the messaging took out their frustrations on engineers and transportation professionals.

Reprinted below (with permission) is an email sent to me by Bryan Jones, one of the professional engineers in attendance at the conference, expressing his concerns over how some of the advocates who spoke at PWPB Pro Place engaged in what I would call engineer-bashing. After spending 40 years as a transportation engineer myself, I empathize with Bryan (who works, for the record, as the Deputy Director of the City of Carlsbad, California’s Transportation Department). As an engineer, I too have often borne the brunt of folks frustrated with the direction of transportation over the last 50 years.  

I felt that Bryan’s email was worth sharing, not so much in an effort to defend my profession, but because I know that Bryan is 100% correct in pointing out that when advocacy unleashes harsh and personal rhetoric, it not only distracts us from the path to change, it deepens the barrier that we have to cross to engage the transportation for change. Bryan’s remarks about the reaction in some quarters to our disappointment with MAP-21 also resonated with me. Stomping our feet over what could or should have been will do no good.

I hope you will enjoy Bryan’s observations as much as I did.  –Gary Toth

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Dear Gary;

I wanted to take a moment after Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place to share that I really enjoyed the conference. There were many great sessions and featured keynote speakers. For me, it was about connecting and reconnecting with people and fostering relationships. It was about hearing what others are doing in their organizations whether in advocacy, government, private business, or non-profits, at the local, regional, state, or national level. The 2012 organizers did a great job bringing the Pro Place theme into the conversations. I was fascinated and inspired by people from Project for Public Spaces like Fred & Ethan Kent, and advocates like Victor Dover. They brought a great new language and conversation to the Pro Walk/Pro Bike movement. Their messages resonated with me as their work results in creating streets, places, and communities where people want to be. And that means jobs, new businesses, and thriving and safe communities. The City of Long Beach and the host committee also did a fantastic job. Well done Charlie Gandy and team!

While the host committee reached out to organizations like the Institute for Transportation Engineers and AASHTO, there was an undertone throughout the conference that these organizations and their members along with a certain political party was to blame for society’s current problems. So the reach out was one step forward, but the undertone might have been two to five steps backwards. In fact, some of the speakers did not even make it an undertone. When speakers attack certain professions such as Traffic Engineering or political parties such as Republicans, it does not create partnerships or unity for a movement but furthers polarization and a greater divide. Most engineers at this conference felt unwelcome if they could not overcome or look past some of the speaker’s attacks.

The speakers were good, and their message could have been delivered without attacking or blaming. I heard it during keynote speeches and in break-out sessions. A good analogy would be a comedian’s or musician’s talents that get lost or unheard because of their curse language that prevents some from attending or listening. However, many of the speakers spoke to the choir and audience present rather than connecting with, welcoming, and reaching out to these new organizations which could be our partners now and in the future. In fact, I heard from many engineers that they felt unwelcome, which is definitely not a feeling we want them leaving with because we need them as partners and collaborators. I have been working closely with advocacy organizations for most of my career, and I feel my collaborative experiences with them have allowed me to be a better engineer and planner. I always encourage my colleagues in the engineering and planning professions to proactively engage advocacy organizations in a collaborative manner.

We can dwell on the perceived setback of MAP-21 and become victims. It is an easy position to take. However, our reality is in our thoughts and we can focus our thoughts on all the great successes that have been accomplished and how to foster more of these successes. We can focus on what we “CAN” do rather than what we “CAN’T” do. Blaming others or specific groups for our built environment accomplishes very little and, as I remember one of my mentors saying, when you point blame on others there are three fingers pointing back at you. We have to be careful throwing rocks in a glass house. We live in a democracy so our built environment is the responsibility of all of us…now and in the past and future. And it has caused unintended public health, environmental, and mobility costs to name just a few of the consequences.

I might suggest that we can focus on changing to a culture of Active Transportation by changing the language and conversations. We need to identify and LISTEN to what our allies’ and perceived enemies’ objectives are. We should not just be talking, but SHOWING how effective our alternatives are through implementation—even at a small scale—with consistency, which can build a lot of momentum. However this requires us to CONNECT PEOPLE. A title I might suggest for 2014–I heard this “connection” discussion in April Economides presentation about her team’s success in Long Beach with Bicycle Friendly Business Districts. She changed perceptions by changing the language and conversations with people that were against bikes. While her passion is green stuff, she understood the passion of many of the business owners was also “green” $tuff! She spoke with them about the pro$perity of welcoming bike riders into their business districts, and did a lot of listening to their concerns and objectives.

Just so you know a little about me, this was my first Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference…although I called it Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. I  am a Traffic Engineer, but also a Professional Transportation Planner; a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners; a League-Certified Instructor from the League of American Bicyclists; an advocate for Bicyclists and Pedestrians; a Complete and Livable Streets Implementer; and a local government public administrator/ leader. I have also had success with implementing Complete and Livable Streets in two jurisdictions (Fresno and Carlsbad) that were fairly automobile-focused when I started in their organization and community.

Neither of these communities has really been on the radar of most in the nation, as we didn’t accomplish change through policies and processes but rather through leadership, making connections, fostering relationships, and focusing on results. A lot of the success in these communities has come from aligning projects with community values and partnering with others like regional MPO’s, advocacy organizations, public health organizations, and our local business community. These two jurisdictions also both happen to be fairly conservative in political climate, so this movement does not have to be about one political party against another. These two communities might be great examples to further explore how political support was gained from a political party that is perceived by many as the enemy or surpressor of progress in transportation.

In my advocacy, I take time to encourage, empower, and enable engineers and planners to be leaders by evaluating and questioning their standards, policies and process and to determine if these standards align with community values and result in the outcomes where people want to walk and bike. We need bold transportation professionals that bring ingenuity and creativity to our profession; the world is ever-changing, and our profession must keep up. I want to also encourage the Pro Walk/Pro Bike organization to continue to utilize those of us in the transportation profession that “get it” and are your allies. We can help bridge the gap and create and foster the necessary relationships and connections with our fellow colleagues that might be slow to adopt the new active transportation system.

We have seen the innovation that has occurred in the telecommunication industry over the last fifty years. It started out with community phones with operators, then private phones, rotary phones to digital push button to wireless. Later the cellular phone was invented and first came with a briefcase size battery and as innovation occurred in the batteries and technology we went through flip phones, phones with keyboards, phone with lots of buttons and we now have the popular iPhone with one button. We are all waiting to see what comes next to help us connect with each other.

We have also seen a change in perspective with storm water regulations in California from quantity to quality. What would it be like if we experienced a change in perspective with transportation from quantity (freeways and wide thoroughfares with expectations of Level of Service C and D for peak hours) to quality.

However, change does not occur as quickly anymore from the Federal or State government. They are too big and remote to serve the people very efficiently and effectively or change course quickly. I am a firm believer that building quality streets, neighborhoods and communities starts with local governments. 85% of Americans lives within these cities. So in 2014…Pro Walk, Pro Bike, Pro Place, PRO PEOPLE! We could even add Pro Business and Pro Jobs! Or Pro Prosperity! or as this article suggests Pro Community Thrive! Just some thoughts on how the messaging could be better received by potential partners of tomorrow that maybe perceived by some as enemies of the movement today.

Bryan D. Jones, TE, PTP, AICP, MPA
Deputy Director
City Traffic Engineer
Transportation Department
City of Carlsbad

The Urban-to-Rural Transect allows for a much wider variety of street types than many road design guides.

“Street design manuals and land use plans are the moulds that our cities come out of,” noted Ryan Snyder during a presentation on the Model Design Manual for Living Streets at the Congress for New Urbanism’s Transportation Summit, which took place last month in Long Beach, CA. “What we need to be asking right now is: What could our manuals give us? … Streets are the majority of our public space. Why do we only let the engineers design it?”

Snyder’s question was at the heart of a discussion that stretched across the back-to-back CNU Summit and Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference (PWPB). Among the hundreds of active transportation advocates, planners, designers, and enthusiasts gathered in Long Beach, there was a core group of engineers who were grappling with new federal legislation, shifting funding structures, and public trends—and how these rather dramatic changes would affect the future of their field. Within this group, everyone seemed to agree that design guides and tools like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ (AASHTO) Functional Classification System, Level of Services, and Green Book are being misused to block change rather than to build smarter, safer roads that serve their communities.

Fortunately, that’s getting more difficult in an era of fiscal constraint. As AASHTO director John Horsley explained during a panel at the CNU Summit, “We can’t build [roads] in the old way because we can’t afford [to build enough highway capacity to keep up with the] land use pattern of sprawl. My guys work for the governors. You can’t do it the same way anymore because if you look at a 10-year fiscal sustainability timeline, you just can’t get there from here.”

This is something that many people, both within and from outside of the transportation field, can no doubt understand and relate to. Economic recession and the resulting fiscal constraint are forcing people in every field—particularly those where the public sector is involved—to re-consider how they do what they do. We’re re-assessing our priorities, getting more creative about financing, and questioning our sacred cows. As many have already pointed out over the past few years, a recession, while undeniably painful, can be energizing in how it forces organizations and industries to innovate.

For Placemakers and New Urbanists (plenty of overlap there), in a way, the timing of this recession is fortuitous. Just as many Americans are waking up to the mounting problems arising from the way that we’ve built our cities over the past fifty years of auto-centric policy-making, the money for the capital-intensive model of yesteryear is disappearing. The Placemaking movement has grown significantly over the past few decades, and offers a robust model for tying citizens more directly to the decision-making process around the way their communities are shaped. Seen through this lens, public engagement isn’t a necessary evil that designers and engineers have to deal with on the way to pushing through new roads, but an opportunity for building a broad base of public support that can be leveraged to fund future solutions, many of which could avoid building costly infrastructure.

Now, as the money available shrinks and public awareness of the importance of Place grows, the time is ripe for the development of new design guides that offer more flexibility in the possible outcomes that they can produce, and for highlighting the flexibility that already exists in guides like the Green Book. As Snyder argued above, these guides play a crucial role in how our world is organized; streets are places, and they must be treated as such. This means involving many more people than just transportation officials in determining how to measure the success of a given roadway. “Traffic engineers are doing what the public has trained them to do for decades,” argued PPS’s Gary Toth during a discussion at PWPB. “They’re problem solvers, so if you want new solutions, give them new problems.”

Great streets are entirely within our reach--as long as we're asking engineers the right questions! / Photo: PPS

By necessity, transportation engineering is a hyper-professionalized field; we certainly don’t want average citizens in complete control of how roads are designed. But there is more room for people to work with engineers on the roads that do come through their neighborhoods. Current design guides oversimplify the types of communities that our roadways serve—the Functional Classification System goes so far as to divide all roads into two types: urban and rural. By contrast, the New Urbanist Urban-to-Rural Transect includes seven different types of land use patterns.

“Part of our problem,” Horsley stated, “is that we live in a siloed world. Our guys think of themselves as street, road, and highway designers, not [community builders]. The Placemaking concept that PPS advocates is an alien concept to them. Somebody needs to link what needs to be done at the community level to what our guys do when they plan the networks. Part of what we need to do is give permission to the transpo guys to look at a broader array of issues…We need different vocabulary for the same objectives.”

If the crowd at the CNU Summit and PWPB is any indication, that new vocabulary is evolving quickly. Guides like Snyder’s Model Design Manual for Living Streets, which was created to guide how roads are designed and built in the infamously auto-centric city of Los Angeles, explicitly builds people and Placemaking into the design process. “Our streets are public space, and they impact so many areas of our lives,” Snyder explained. “We wanted to look at equity, look at things for all ages, all modes, connectivity, traffic calming as part of the design; we wanted something that connects people.”

Connecting people is what roads have always done, in theory, but for too long we’ve been thinking of that connection purely across long distances. We connect from home to work, or from our neighborhood to our friends across town. Today that logic is clearly shifting. Our streets must be designed to encourage human connection within neighborhoods: out on the sidewalks, in the bike lanes, along leafy boulevards, and in public squares lined with lively local businesses. What should our design manuals give us? That’s a question that Placemakers—not just engineers—need to answer, and now.

Tedson Meyers

I recently had the opportunity to chat, via Skype, with Tedson Meyers. Tedson is the kind of person who has accomplished so much, and been involved with so many organizations, it’s hard to introduce him without feeling like you’re going to leave out all of the important parts, no matter how hard you try–so I’ll keep this intro short & let you get on to the good stuff.

In addition to stints with the Peace Corps and the Marines, Tedson served on the City Council in Washington, DC, before the establishment of home rule in 1973. He was also one of the founders of the Bicycle Federation of America, which has since become the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, the host organization for this week’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place conference in Long Beach, California. You can see Tedson tomorrow, when he delivers opening remarks and introduces PPS President Fred Kent at the conference’s breakfast plenary.

So now, without further ado…

I hear you have some interesting stories about your time on the DC City Council. You were appointed by Nixon, is that right?

Right; the council had to be balanced both in party and race, and at that moment they were looking for a white inner city Democrat. His staff had come across the fact that I was a successful crime fighter by leading my neighborhood, which was mixed black, white, and Latino, to take back our street after two dead and two wounded in eleven months. We did simple things like floodlight the street, which sent a message. We presented ourselves to the absentee landlords and said we could do a better job managing the property than their absentee agents and they agreed. That quiet little community effort that we never thought would get anybody’s attention not only made the two local newspapers but also the three American television networks, the BBC, the German national television, and a spread in Look Magazine.

What was enchanting about it all is that I had been sent up to run New York state on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. I’d been a Hubert Humphrey speechwriter as a volunteer before. We came up eight points and beat Nixon by four points in New York by changing the public relations policy to a get-out-the-vote campaign because that’s the only way New York Democrats get results without killing themselves. I had come down from New York earlier to live in Washington. According to people who heard the tapes, he said something like, ‘He beat me in New York?’ They said yes, so he said, ‘I want him on the City Council.’ Of course I was immediately terrified by the thought, but I went to talk to the Democratic National Committee people who knew me and they said, ‘Oh Lord, please do it.’ So there I was. This was in ’72. It was a very different city from the one we see today.

And it could have been even moreso: you were involved with thwarting the effort to push a freeway through downtown DC, correct? There must be an interesting story there…

We had a highway director, Tom Arris, who was an awfully good man and very professional, but he’d never met a blade of grass he didn’t want to pave. He had the very bright idea of bringing I-66, which ends at the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, into DC and—Brace yourself!—down the National Mall as a covered trench: a four lane highway parallel to Ohio Drive on the river side of the Mall with a grilled trench on top. Then it would dive under the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River, come up on the other side, and join I-295.

Tom had gotten as far as the City Council; we were the last stop. Well, the Marine in me just turned blue. I quietly called a friend of mine who was the Chief of Police, and I said ‘I’d like to borrow a helicopter.’ He said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ So I went up with a very skilled pilot, and we hovered over the district end of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. I did some counting with a clicker and a pair of field glasses, and it was perfectly clear that the traffic was not going to go where he said it would. It was all going north. I prepared a report, but then thought better of it, and I asked the Chief if I could borrow the chopper on another day so that I’d have two complete reports. The results were the same. The City Council met, and I shared my report with everybody. I also suggested the awful consequences of putting a highway down one of the most cherished scenes in America. They voted unanimously to kill it.

It turned out that Tom was so sure he was going to win that he’d already had the red, white, and blue signs painted. What I had not known is that half the highway department detested the idea including his deputies. He knew it, but he was a good man and if they disagreed, fine. They called to ask if they could visit me and they came with one of the signs. They said, “Councilman, here is your war trophy.” That sign hung in my home for years and now it hangs in the backyard in Fairhope, Alabama.

The Freeway that Never Was

What does the sign say?

It just says “I-695 DC.” The highway that never was! Once, when it was hanging in my home, some police officers had reason to be in the house and one of them said, ‘Hey, that’s government property.’ I said ‘Well, yes, it was; but it was a gift.’ And he said ‘But there is no I-695.’ And I said, ‘do you know why?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, you’re looking at the reason!’

That, alone, is a pretty significant contribution to keeping DC bike and pedestrian friendly—but you’re also one of the founders of Bicycle Federation of America (now the NCBW).

Yes. While I was on the City Council I tried to find ways to affect the legislation of the city to ensure more bike paths and pedestrian safety. I spent a day in a wheelchair with two paraplegic war veterans followed by television cameras showing the public how hard it was to get around DC in a wheelchair. The result was those curb cuts at every corner in downtown for wheelchairs, baby carriages, etc. But I failed miserably to really make serious progress. My term ended in ’75 on the City Council, and home rule came. David Clarke beat me in the election for my seat, and I was glad that he did. He went on to become City Council Chairman, but died far too young.

The unfinished business of bikes and safety and the streets got me thinking, and I called together the crew that was helping me before—Katie Moran, Bill Wilkinson, Noel Grove—and said I’m ready to back this but we need an Executive Director, and they suggested Dan Burden, who’d just lead the Bike Centennial ride from the Pacific to the Atlantic. We met at the Golden Temple Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in DC, and there was born the Bicycle Federation of America.

Within a couple years it was clear that we should be having conferences. Dan’s term ended because he had an opportunity to take over and lead Florida in the biking field. Katie Moran became the next Executive Director. We had our first bi-annual Pro Bike conference in Asheville, North Carolina, with 200 hard-eyed advocates. Before the recession, my recollection is we reached almost 800 in Seattle. What’s fascinating is the nature of the attendance. The hard-eyed advocates are still there, and God bless ‘em, but it has come to a point that is ideal, I think, for where PPS wants to take it, to re-frame biking and walking as a way to create livable, healthy communities with new options for getting around.

It does seem like this year could be a real turning point, in terms of driving cultural change around the country.

We last noticed that the fastest-growing professional group in attendance is traffic and transportation engineers—and believe me, we didn’t see one of them when we started. Part of the problem was an unexpected consequence of a blessing. The blessing was the Eisenhower interstate highway system, which beautifully lifted the economy, allowed people to visit family and friends where they never could easily before, and moved goods and services like we’d never had—but it also raised a generation of transportation engineers who thought there was nothing wrong with bringing it downtown.

What we’re up against is reversing a trend and an attitude in what’s important in moving people around, which has so relied on the automotive industry, and finding ways to restore alternative means of getting around. One of the biggest problems is that that wonderful highway system allows our living world to sprawl far from our working world, which means people need to travel extensively. I just came back from an AARP study in South Dakota. City people probably have no sense of this, but as small towns disappear or the businesses in them fail and have to close, the distances people have to go just for groceries could be 50 miles one way. As someone said out there, “We go 50 miles and we’re not halfway to the middle of nowhere.”

It’s going to become something we ought to talk about at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. We need to recognize that non-emergency medical transportation in some parts of this country are absolutely imperiled, so badly that in South Dakota, and neighboring communities and states, many women are electing mastectomy over chemotherapy because they don’t want to travel 300 miles three days a week. It’s a growing problem of epic proportions and very much a result of decentralization. The reverse of that process can be seen in the Pennsylvania Avenue plan in DC, where a plan for upgrades made sure that just one to three blocks north of that corridor, residences would be built so that people could come back to the community and walk to work. That is happening. We’re only at the bottom rung of the ladder but hopefully these conferences will start to become an important factor in addressing these issues over the next years. The nicest thing about all this for me is that we got it started.

"The Eisenhower interstate highway system...raised a generation of transportation engineers who thought there was nothing wrong with bringing it downtown." / Photo: Matthew Rutledge via Flickr

Can you tell me a bit more about your work with AARP? You were talking earlier about going out on the street with a wheelchair and actually seeing how difficult it was for people with disabilities to navigate the city.

You know, one of the most astonishing things I learned in that wheelchair—and nobody seems to speak of it—but because our sidewalks and slanted towards the street for rain runoff, if you’re making your way in a wheelchair parallel to the street, your outside arm has to be working twice as hard as your inside arm or else you’re going to roll off into the curb. There are so many factors we don’t even consider, in terms of how our street design impacts people with physical disabilities. That’s just one example.

As for the AARP, well, folks down here in Baldwin County, Alabama, learned I founded the Bicycle Federation; the next thing I know, I’m helping to write and get lobbied into law the Alabama Trails Commission Law. Then I joined a group of tigers, the Baldwin County Trailblazers, who are building the area’s bikeped system. That led to my being on the board of Smart Coast, which has interest in two fields: one is health, safety, and livable communities; the other is sustainable businesses. Someone from the AARP happened to be in the room when I was doing some work, and asked me to join the Executive Council of AARP Alabama, and to apply to be on AARP’s 25-member National Policy Council. That’s a group of marvelous people who are selected from around the country—one, an ex-ambassador, one who used to be mayor of Pierre and head of the highway patrol out there—just a great variety of men and women with an excellent representation of women, especially in leadership.

The Policy Council is divided into three subcommittees: health, economic affairs, and livable communities. You can guess which one I’m on! What intrigued me is that Dan Burden is currently under a national contract with the AARP because livable communities is a critical topic since there are so many 50+ people who need to have the availability of services, alternative means of transportation, an ability to get amongst other people, and have active lives. If they’re living somewhere in a suburb, that’s often impossible to do. The Policy Council is not the advocacy side of the AARP—we recommend which of the policies should be the subject of focus; the Board of Directors decide which shall be the focus of advocacy in any given year. The overall policy decisions of what AARP stands for in any of those three fields—livable communities, economics, and health—that’s written by the Policy Council. That’s what we’re doing, and this is my first year.

What are you looking forward to at Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place this year?

On the one hand, the familiar faces—and on the other hand the new ones! The sustainability of this event has been amazing. Even in hard economic times, it seems to attract people—as it should. One of the things I love is that a number of organizations that are now healthy and long-lived began because people first met at Pro Bike and kept coming back. This is the 17^th biannual conference of people who have been gathering, devoted to this subject. It’s become the expected place to meet and throw ideas into the pot, the return two years later to report on how it all worked out. I’m so delighted now that Fred Kent’s on top with Gary and Mark. It plays into the PPS dynamic just beautifully.

Bicyclists fill a street during a Critical Mass ride in Vancouver / Photo: David Pritchard via Flickr

In 1980, the very first Pro Bike conference was convened in Asheville, North Carolina. At the time, the movement to carve out more space for bicycling on North American streets was young, and the first conference was attended by around 100 people. Thirty-two years later, the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place is expected to draw a thousand active transportation advocates to Long Beach, California. The expanded conference title reflects the dramatic transformation of bicycling advocacy into today’s active transportation movement, as more and more people have begun to realize the importance of thinking of streets as places that tie communities together.

Recently, PPS’s Gary Toth and Brendan Crain had the opportunity to chat, informally, with Dan Burden, Andy Clarke, and Charlie Gandy, three friends and advocates who have played very active roles in this transformation. The following is a transcript of that conversation, looking back over the past three decades and reflect on lessons learned thus far.

Brendan: Can you each start out by talking about how you got involved in advocating for active transportation?

Dan: I started with advocacy around 1962, by promoting some biking events. Then very quickly folks like Charlie Gandy and I started working through the American Youth Hostels to put on even bigger events. Charlie, I don’t know what time you entered the scene, probably the mid or late 1960s?

Andy: Are you kidding? He wasn’t even born in 1960! [Laughter]

Charlie: Geez you old coot, what are you talking about? I showed up, and you and I met, in about ’85 or ’86, through Youth Hostels.

Dan: Back then, it really was the AYH playing a huge role. It was a concurrent evolution. The League of American Bicyclists had started up just about that time in the early 1960s, although the real advocacy started with recreation. The active transportation side, the health side, and the bike commuter side probably didn’t get a good launch until the early 1970s.

At the first Pro Walk/Pro Bike—actually, back then it was just Pro Bike—we honored Bob Cleckner. Bob was the first full-time paid professional in America to go around and really try to drum up interest in this stuff, starting with bike lanes; he was my inspiration. He was getting paid to go around the country and get adults to stop thinking of bicycling as something that was just for children. He worked for what was then called the Bicycle Manufacturers Association. We shared offices with them back in those early years when we started the Bicycle Federation of America [which later became the National Center for Bicycling and Walking].

Andy: As Dan said, the League was re-formed back in the mid-60s. They’d been absent for about ten years, and it was because of the support of Schwinn and the bike industry that the League got back on its feet. By the early 1970s, we started to work more on advocacy issues. The oil crisis in 1973 was a defining moment. One is always bitten in the ass by history because you think you’re doing something for the first time and it never turns out that you are. But I would be so bold as to say that the renaissance we’ve seen in the last 4-5 years in bicycling is probably the biggest boost we’ve seen since that oil crisis and the explosion of interest in cycling . Communities realized again that perhaps we shouldn’t have completely thrown cycling away.

When I moved here from the UK in 1985, the state of bike advocacy was such that we were able to convince the Immigration and Nationalization Service that letting me in here to be the League’s government relations director would not be taking a job from anyone else who was an American in the country. In 1988 there literally wasn’t anyone doing that. I think the Rails to Trails Conservancy was probably three years old? There was no America Bikes, no Bikes Belong. A lot of the groups that we work with now weren’t around yet. In the intervening 25 years we’ve seen things come a long way.

It’s very interesting—you can chart the progress of where the inspiration for advocacy was coming from and where groups were formed, particularly at the state and local level, by just looking at their names. In the 1970s the League was the only show in town, and we were doing a lot of advocacy on getting the legal status of cyclists straight. Groups that were formed in the wake of that are groups like the League of Illinois Bicyclists. Then in the 80s the Bicycle Federation took over and groups that formed became Federations. Charlie Gandy led the way in the 90s and started the Coalition movement with the Texas Bicycle Coalition (TBC). In the 2000s, groups started using declarative titles like Georgia Bikes! or Bike Delaware. Now folks are forming Alliances, and many are formally adding walking to their names as well. It’s uncanny how that catches on, and you can tell when a group was established by the title they give themselves.

Charlie: Going to Copenhagen back in ’76 and riding a bike really opened my eyes to the notion of a bicycle being a respected and valuable tool in an urban place. That stayed latent for me until about 1990, when I formed the TBC with a bunch of other interested cyclists that were looking for political respect and power. That put me in contact with Dan Burden, who was one of the first bike professionals within a state agency, at the DOT in Florida. He came to Austin, and I put him up as an expert in this field in front of our state DOT leadership. Our tactic was to get bike coordinators at the state and local level within the DOT—this was ahead of ISTEA mandating it—and Dan convinced them that it would be smarter to fold their hand and just do that, rather than take us on. It was really a powerful lesson for me as a political organizer to see Dan’s ability, as the guy from out of town, to be effective at moving an agency to do something very tangible.

That started my learning about how we could turn the crank at the state and local levels and improve conditions for cyclists, organizing to give them a cohesive voice. I started attending Pro Bike in the early 90s as the Executive Director of the TBC. Then in ’94 I went to work for Bill Wilkinson at the Bicycle Federation, with Andy and Dan. Andy and I were protégés of Dan’s, and Wilkinson was pulling the strings. I remember going to my first Pro Bike and thinking what an incredible learning institution and networking opportunity this thing was.

Gary: I think we should get Charlie talking about how he did the first Walk Audits for FHWA in the mid-90s.

Charlie: In about ’96, Wilkinson comes out with his hand up in the air barely holding onto this piece of a proposal and he says “I’ve got something here related to walking, does somebody want to take this?” At that time, both Burden and Clarke turned their heads and walked away. [Laughter] Nobody wanted to do walking stuff. But I was working on my first million frequent flyer miles, and I jumped at the opportunity to go around to Grand Rapids, and the Bronx, and Snowmass, and a bunch of other places. “Pedestrian Roadshows,” is what they called them.

Dan: Actually, walk audits really started in the 80s. When I came back from Australia after doing some work on bicycling there, I realized that the real answer to reactivating and re-energizing cities was in the walkability side. So starting around 1981, at the Florida DOT, we changed my job title instantly. And that was the origin of the first ped-bike coordinator! I was having trouble with my engineers, when they would design intersections; they were getting them completely wrong. So I said we need to go out and walk around them and understand. It was later, when Bill saw what I was doing, that he realized that there was funding that could be secured for this, and later developed the Pedestrian Roadshows.

Charlie: That was back when they were referring to the sidewalks as “auto recovery zones,” right?

Gary: So the pedestrians were impact attenuators?  [Laughter]

Dan Burden leads a walk audit in Linden, Michigan / Photo: Michigan Municipal League via Flickr

Dan: But looking even further back, there are a few people that I’d be remiss in not bringing up, who were critical to the formation of the bikeped movement as we know it now. These people did things that nobody was doing. The first is Dr. Paul Dudley White, who was the heart surgeon for Eisenhower that really launched biking as an adult activity. He got the attention of the press, and he did it by pushing the idea that people needed exercise. Way before the modern health movement got going, he realized that benefit. He was probably doing his work starting around 1959, but he really was starting to command serious press until 61. This was around when I was starting to realize this is what I wanted to do with my life, so Dr. White was a hero of mine.

Another name that should not be lost to history is Dr. Clifford Graves, a surgeon in San Diego who started the International Bicycle Touring Society and got big-name adults to go on bicycle tours in Europe and the US. He also started bicycle clubs for teenagers in the California area, and all of those preceded anything going on with the League. Fred DeLong was an engineer that worked for one of the big battery manufacturers out of Philadelphia, and his work preceded John Forester‘s Effective Cycling program, by about four years. DeLong helped raise awareness about the technical side of adult bicycling—how to brake, how to turn, how to set up your bike—he really put the science into it.

Brendan: The idea that just getting adults to ride bikes was seen as broadening the constituency is so radically different from how we think of bicycling now. Bikeped advocates have been very good, historically, at drawing new people and new groups in, and that’s clearly been important in terms of this going from something that was very informal, driven by zealous nuts, to creating a contemporary movement that’s very broad and formal, with so many people dedicating their careers to bicycling and pedestrian issues. Just thirty years ago, there were only two or three people doing this work full-time!

Andy: It’s been really interesting to see how the bike movement has provided the passion and fuel for the Safe Routes to Schools movement, which has taken us into uncharted territory in terms of constituencies that now care about Safe Routes and the issues around that. The same is true of Complete Streets. The walking movement is such a more prominent issue for the broader public today; it’s more marketable, immediate, and unimpeachable. But without bicyclists at the start of that, there wouldn’t be the walking movement or the active transportation movement or the Complete Streets or the Safe Routes movements that we have now. It’s important that we’ve been able to, in certain cases, sort of let go and let these branches grow off.

Charlie: I’d like to build on that because, as the bicycle movement has become more mainstream, it has made sense for us to broaden the perspective and to partner up and to see the value in the coalition with pedestrians and a realization that what we’ve been talking about is Placemaking—and I remember learning early on from Dan about how instilling that vision of the place puts bicycling in context. We self- identify as bicyclists and we’ve organized a political voice around that, and we’ve found through coalition that we have more of a mainstream voice. Today, it’s the health people and women bicyclists that are really emerging, at least in the US, as fresh voices within the movement.

Gary: It seems like a lot of this type of advocacy starts with biking first and then branches out to walking and related activities; why do you think that is? And why did the bicycling movement emerge so many decades ahead of the walking movement in the first place?

Dan: A bit of historic perspective on that: the pedestrian movement was actually occurring as bicycling was emerging, but cycling came out more strongly, I think, because it had technological side to it that adults could get into—where a lot of people, even to this day, think of walking as, well… pedestrian! That it’s something you try to get away from as an adult.

I think we should keep in mind that there was a pedestrian movement that was growing up simultaneously, and it wasn’t as though the bicyclists branched out and created the pedestrian movement, although many are reaching across the aisle now. There used to be a small annual pedestrian conference in Boulder, Colorado back in the 80s and 90s; it was the only place where people were really talking about these issues for a long time. Those went on for 12 -13 years before the city council finally stopped funding them. Even a few years before that, Donald Appleyard organized one of the first meetings to talk about traffic calming, in Seattle. Looking at these early strings, we can see where they finally stitched one another together.

Once they become good advocates for bicycling, an issue they care so much about, they begin to realize they’re not the only ones that are being overlooked. So they get into the pedestrian side, and eventually they start to realize, well, we need destinations and places to go for this stuff to work, and then it broadens out from there.

Andy: This is absolutely true of Complete Streets. For the longest time, we banged on about what was then called “Routine Accommodation,” and how we wanted bicyclists and pedestrians to be routinely accommodated in all projects. We almost got that principal written into the transportation bills in ’91 and ’98, but it just wasn’t resonating. Finally, in the early 2000s, Martha Roskowski of America Bikes convened a phone conference with bunch of smart marketing people, and that was where the phrase “Complete Streets” was coined, I think by David Goldberg, from Smart Growth America. Almost overnight, Complete Streets started to carry a tune. This was something we’d written about with different names for years! [Editor's Note: The term "complete streets" has been attributed to several people in different accounts, including Martha Roskowski.]

A Complete Street is a street where everyone feels comfortable, whether they're in a car, on a bike, or on their own two feet / Photo: Complete Streets Coalition via Flickr

Brendan: Looking back over the past few decades of advocacy, what are your thoughts on how the movement has evolved, broadly? Did you expect to be this far along, or think you would be even farther? And what impact would you say PWPB has had since the first conference in 1980?

Dan: I discovered recently, while having lunch with Richard Killingsworth, that it was a presentation at a PWPB conference that totally turned around his attitude toward his work at the CDC. He went back and said ‘Folks, it’s not about curing diseases anymore, it’s about preventing them.’ But no one would listen to him. And he worked for a year and finally got folks like Richard Jackson, Andy Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin to take a different approach. Not long after, he got funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2001 to leave the CDC and start Active Living by Design, and over time Frumkin and Dannenberg moved out to Washington, and Richard Jackson went to UCLA where he’s still advocating for Healthy Places. So if we stop to think about it now, there are billions of dollars now being focused on health through active living, and that started at a Pro Bike conference. There wouldn’t have been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation putting money into this if it wasn’t for Richard Killingsworth realizing that there had to be a new approach for the CDC.

Andy: Looking at the movement, in terms of the numbers—specifically the number of people involved, the number of staff in advocacy groups and government—the movement has come an enormous way. It’s like night and day. It’s been extraordinary to see that and be a small part of it. But on the other hand, 30 years is a helluva long time. In terms of outcomes, it’s hard to be too optimistic about the impact that we’ve had because we’ve still seen 30 years of really awful community development in the majority of communities across the country. It’s a really big ship to turn. We really have to step up our game to make a much bigger change in outcomes—not in the next 30 years, but the next three years if we’re going to have a legacy we can all be proud of. We can’t wait 30 years to have another incremental step up in the number of people walking and biking.

Dan: There’s an enthusiasm that you don’t see in other professions and other trades that is a hallmark of what the walkability and the bicycling movements. If I were to project forward about what’s coming, we have to get the vast majority of people who come into the movement to realize that it’s the Placemaking—the creation of places for social exchange—that’s the missing piece. We’ve got to get away from just thinking of it as active transportation and think of it as rescuing our cities, redesigning our cities for people, and building the economy around the scale of the human foot. Until we do that walking can’t work, and bicycling can’t work.

I agree with Andy: we can’t wait 30 years; three years may be all that we’ve got. We’re talking about a totally wrecked economy, one where we keep trying to go back to building things that cannot be sustainable, cannot even be maintained; if we keep doing things the way they were done in the past, the US is at risk of becoming a third-world nation. There’s more at stake here than just giving ourselves a nice place to ride a bike or to walk.

Charlie: One of the identifying characteristics of this group is its collaborative spirit. I’ve noticed in my travels that that’s a fairly unique thing. Throughout the past few decades, there’s been a whole lot of innovation and invention going on, and guys like Dan, Andy, Pete Lagerway, and so many others have been freely sharing these ideas. I think that’s true at PWPB as well as one on one, and I think that’s a unique element of our success.

Andy: I would absolutely echo that; that’s a really important thing to identify. You see, from one consulting firm to another, people just want to help each other get the right answer, and just want to get a good outcome. That is pretty remarkable, I think.

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You’ve read about the past thirty years of bikeped advocacy–if you want to become part of the next crucial three, join us in Long Beach this September 10-13 for Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place. Remember–standard registration ends at midnight on August 10th, at which point registration rates will rise, so click here to register for the conference today!

Even in Red Deer's downtown area, pedestrians play second fiddle to automotive traffic / Photo: Gary Toth

Red Deer, Alberta, is a small city about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Once a sleepy agricultural outpost that provided a convenient stopover for travelers moving between the territory’s two larger cities, Red Deer has experienced substantial growth over the past three decades due to the growth of the oil industry, booming from 30,000 residents in 1975 to just over 90,000 in 2012. As might be expected given that time frame, virtually all of the new growth has taken the form of auto-oriented sprawl.

Today, the City Council is seeking to change that, and have developed a new civic vision that is outlined in the Strategic Direction 2012 – 2014 report. This vision included the creation of an Integrated Movement Study (IMS) with the following goal:

“Our deliberate decision to create viable alternatives to single occupant vehicle travel in our transportation network encourages healthy active lifestyles, environmental stewardship, supports safety for people of all ages, increases use of our public and green spaces, and integrates our sidewalks, trails, bike lanes, transit service, rail, and roads with our built environment.”

Red Deer began to retune their downtown streets even before the start of the Integrated Movement Study, as evidenced by the rightsizing of Gaetz Avenue. Note the deployment of chicanes. / Photo: Gary Toth

Earlier this month, PPS’s Gary Toth was invited by the City and 8-80 Cities, which is leading the IMS, to conduct several interactive sessions on the role that Complete Streets might play in moving Red Deer to a balanced and livable transportation network. While in Red Deer, Gary facilitated two interactive discussions on Complete Streets as part of a workshop called Building Better Blocks. The first discussion began with photos of several streets, some with designated bike and bus lanes and some with none. Participants were asked to discuss whether the streets were complete. Quite a few of the participants argued that the streets without bike lanes were not complete, but as the discussion unfolded, the group came to understand that Complete Streets policies do not require that designated space be provided for each mode, but rather that travel via all modes be safe, comfortable & convenient for everyone, regardless of age or ability.

This means that bike lanes are not only not required, but sometimes even discouraged. When street dimensions and adjacent land uses slow vehicular speeds to below 20 mph, for instance, it is actually preferred that bicyclists share the street with the cars. Sharing space forces everyone to be more cautious and observant, and creates safer driving conditions for the drivers and bikers, as well as nearby pedestrians.

Workshop participants quickly pointed out that while this Dublin Street was technically a “Complete Street”, its value to the community was limited due to lack of fostering the Street as a Place. / Photo: Gary Toth

Participants at the Red Deer workshop also quickly grasped the fact that allocating space for all modes doesn’t automatically generate pedestrian and bicycle traffic. With little prompting, participants recognized that streets such as the one from Dublin, pictured to the left, would benefit greatly from a Placemaking process that would engage residents in planning for how the street will be used, ensuring that the space would meet local needs and attract more people out to use the street. This idea is at the core of PPS’s Streets as Places initiative.

Armed with this new awareness of what it takes to complete a street, workshop participants went outside to test their ideas in a unique learning environment. Called Safety City, the space is a reduced-scale network of streets and buildings created to teach the children of Red Deer about how to safely navigate their city’s streets, both on foot and in cars. The adults in the workshop were provided with a range of props that they used to re-shape the small scale streets with bike lanes, medians, crosswalks and bulb-outs—and there was no lack of creativity in doing so!

The following day, Gary led a group of City officials—planners, engineers and others— advocates, and stakeholders through an exercise designed to foster mindfulness of the 20^th Century practice of planning streets solely for high-speed auto traffic. Starting with the dawn of the private car and accelerating after World War II, street planning policies have completely ignored the diverse uses of streets for generations, sacrificing communities to move automotive traffic as efficiently as possible. What is needed now in Red Deer (and around the world) is a return to the practice of creating a wide palette of street types that are sensitive to the community context. This range is known by planners as a “Street Typology,” and while the name may be cumbersome, Street Typologies are nimble tools that lead to streets that better serve their surroundings.

Street Typologies seek not to turn over every one of our streets to the bicycle and pedestrian at the expense of moving goods and vehicles, but instead aim for a balanced transportation system. Developing a range of context sensitive street types provides cities with the flexibility to design different streets in different ways, and fosters a civic mindset that leads to more people thinking about streets as places not just vessels for moving cars, but for tying the community together. Street Typologies also ease the resistance of transportation professionals to new ideas, since they reassure these professionals by making it clear that not all streets will need to be retrofitted to 20 mph Main Street-style corridors. Finally, these typologies convey to community, biking, and pedestrian advocates that the era of relegating all non-motorized street users to secondary and peripheral status is over.

A Red Deer City engineer explains how his group retuned the demonstration street to foster Placemaking as well as comfort for all modes. Median, landscaping, mid block crossings and even a roundabout were created. / Photo: Gary Toth

While each group of participants came up with a slightly different “toolkit” of streets, all agreed that there was room in Red Deer for a wider variety of street types: slower streets where bikes and pedestrians are the priority; destination streets where the primary purpose of the street is social and economic exchange; and wider, faster streets designed to move people and goods around town. As this booming city in the “Texas of the North” has shown, a lot can change in a few decades. Now, with a better understanding of how to create more complete streets, Red Deer is on the road to success.

Gary Toth – Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives, Project for Public Spaces from Clean Air Partnership on Vimeo.

Last month Gary Toth spoke at the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto about the symbiotic relationship between the Complete Streets and Placemaking movements. Early on in the talk, posted above in full, Gary points out that a complete street makes travel “safe, comfortable, and convenient” for all modes–but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it overtly provides for each one in its own area. Complete streets can often include flexible or mixed-mode areas (Salt Lake City’s green lanes are a great example), but the focus should be on creating a street that is welcoming to everyone, no matter the mode of travel.

The question at the heart of Gary’s talk is about how we build community through transportation. When talking about streets, “Complete,” he argues, “has got to be about community-building, not just about taking space away from cars.” Efforts to create more complete streets often bump into opposition that claims bike lanes and bump-outs are part of a “war on cars,” and Gary explains how to re-frame the issue as being about creating neighborhoods that are safer and more inclusive: the kinds of places where you feel comfortable letting your child ride ahead a bit when out biking.

If you enjoy the video above and are interested in learning more about how to engage your local transportation agency to start rethinking streets as places, here’s a link to the Citizens Guide to Better Streets, which Gary mentions at the end of his presentation.

The Village of Cheshire's master plan was developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

I had the unique opportunity to participate in a “Smart Growth” bus tour of communities in North Carolina, organized last year by the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute and the Local Government Commission. We visited a variety of neighborhoods, from low-density to high, pre-car to newly developed, to learn how livable and sustainable principles can help a wide range of communities to adapt to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Important lessons can be learned from each of the communities we visited. None were perfect, but as Joel Garreau pointed out in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, now-revered places like Venice and London were pieced together over centuries; flaws were frequently pointed out by critics, and fixed over time. Flaws in these places will be addressed over time as well. What is critical about each location is that they are testing out new ideas of what a sustainable future could look like. The neighborhoods that had the best sense of place were those that were created over a hundred years, and they serve as great models for how to take Traditional Neighborhood Development, Form Based Codes and other contemporary planning strategies to the next level.

My observations from the experience are below. You can click here to download my full report on the trip, which includes more detailed information on each of the communities that we visited across the state: Charlotte, Belmont, Kannapolis, Cornelius, Davidson, Black Mountain, and Asheville.

1.) Urbanism can be scaled to fit all types of development, from big city to rural: One of the major misconceptions holding back the acceptance of livability and sustainability policies across a broad spectrum of American communities is that urbanism is anti-suburb, and holds no answers for rural areas. The variety of communities seen on the North Carolina Smart Growth Tour proves otherwise. Urbanism has improved livability in communities ranging from small towns like Black Mountain; to once-rural villages like Cornelius, Belmont, and Kannapolis that are struggling to avoid losing their identity as they are being absorbed by modern auto-oriented development; all the way up to larger cities like Asheville and Charlotte that are looking to repair damage inflicted by post-WWII retrofits implemented to make way for cars.

Residential development at the Bland Street Station in Charlotte’s South End / Photo: Gary Toth

True, urbanism reaches is fullest value at higher densities. But the social benefits of having a small center where one can walk to eat breakfast, grab a quart of milk, or hang out and chat with others around a cup of coffee can be achieved even in application of urbanism principles in small – and new – rural villages. While residents of places like Black Mountain and Cornelius will probably not be able to ditch their cars entirely, these places have the potential to reduce the daily auto trip load from the average of 12-14 daily trips per household. While this may not seem significant, reducing daily trips from 14 to 12 represents a 14% decrease – a significant contraction.

The clustering around a center offered by Cornelius and Black Mountain also dramatically increases the feasibility of a transit provider offering service. Typical suburban communities are too spread out to make transit stops efficient. Even a town as small as Black Mountain creates a focal point for passengers waiting for transit service to hang out, grab a cup of coffee, and perhaps even do some business.

More importantly, creation of urbanist developments in these traditional rural areas creates a sense of place, a sense of community, and better livability.

2.) Placemaking, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth can help protect rural communities from losing their identity to suburbanism. Communities such as Davidson, Cornelius, Belmont and Kannapolis have recognized that the biggest threat to their rural landscapes is NOT livability and New Urbanism; it is business-as-usual suburban sprawl. The latter, by leading to formula-driven housing, commercial and office developments that look the same whether in New Mexico, New Jersey, or North Carolina, erodes the sense of community that preceded its arrival. Beginning in 1996, Belmont, Davidson and Cornelius adopted form based codes to help stem the tide of suburbanism emanating out from Charlotte as its metropolitan area boomed.

3.) The production line efficiency of stamping out off-the-rack buildings limits the value of New Urbanism. The Town of Belmont’s clustering of new development into small pods with connected, properly-sized streets and alleys is an important step in the right direction. However, when compared to the Antiquity at Cornelius development, where a series of building styles varies from building to building, Belmont pales. While Cornelius does not exhibit an infinite variety of architectural styles from house to house, even a mild variety in housing types here makes a dramatic difference in the sense of place. It chips away at the “Disney-esque” feeling that New Urbanism is sometimes accused of creating.

4.) Pods of New Urbanist residential development need to be within walking distance of activity centers. Not to pick on Belmont, but their dozen or so New Urbanist pods are isolated and are a mile or two from commercial activity. Belmont does have a quaint, mixed-use Main Street, but shopping options are limited and in tough competition with auto-oriented strip development located along State Route 74, with a particular concentration at the interchange with Interstate 85. Compare this to Antiquity at Cornelius, where a small town center is being built right in the midst of new residential neighborhoods; or Davidson, which has recognized the importance of its historic downtown, surrounded by hundreds of residential units adjacent to and within easy walking distance of downtown. Antiquity, Davidson and even Black Mountain offer the potential to eliminate at least one round trip a day by car. Isolated pods do not.

5.) Livable street design is equally important in all residential places, regardless of population density. Complete streets create the engineering foundation for a great street; Placemaking completes the job. On destination streets, multi-modal activity is fostered by triangulating multiple destinations within easy walking distance. Buildings are located to create the “walls” of an outdoor living room, and ground floor uses engage people on the street. This is as true in the two-story buildings in downtown Belmont as it is with the multi-story buildings on Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte. The street cross sections tame traffic and provide comfortable settings for activity; the speed of cars does not intimidate. A street does not need to have been created 100 years ago to establish the destination street feel, as the developers of Biltmore Park Town Square have proven.

6.) Malls don’t have to be totally auto-dependent, surrounded by seas of parking. Biltmore Park Town Square in Asheville proves that mall can move back towards a more sustainable form, centered on a Main Street and with office and residential mixed in.

7.) New development may need to age gracefully like a fine wine; Placemaking layered on top of modern planning can accelerate the creation of attractive patinas. New Urbanist principles such as Smart Codes, Form Based Codes, Complete Streets, and Mixed-Use Destinations create the bones for sustainable communities. However, while newly-created developments like Antiquity and Biltmore Square, there is some of that “Disney-esque” feel mentioned above. Older downtowns in Asheville and Davidson, by contrast, felt more natural and comfortable, the result of gradual informal Placemaking over the years.

Antiquity at Cornelius / Photo: Gary Toth

Click here to download the full report.

The Destination Creation organizers recorded all of the presentations given during the two-day event, which brought together leaders from the Placemaking and Place Branding movements to discuss how, as ULI’s Edward T. McMahon so succinctly put it in a recent article, “Place is more than just a location on a map.”

Fred’s talk provides an overview on Placemaking, with a specific focus on the importance of the Power of 10 philosophy and the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper strategy for improving a place. Gary spoke about the importance of planning for Streets as Places in creating great destinations.

We write about these ideas frequently here on the Placemaking Blog, but there’s something especially compelling about listening to someone speak about a topic that they’re passionate about, so this seemed worth sharing! You can click here to visit the conference site to hear both talks, complete with accompanying visual presentations.

Photo: Clickr.com

A street can be much more than just a route from Point A to Point B; indeed, streets can be truly great places when a variety of needs, uses, and modes are planned for. Fortunately, the Federal Highway Association (FHWA) has recognized that wider, straighter, faster planning strategies do not work for every road, leading to the creation of the Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) program, which aims to create thoroughfares that are more responsive to local needs.

From the FHWA’s website:

As citizens’ expectations for transportation projects have risen, so too has awareness of community needs among transportation planners and roadway designers. The question now becomes, “how do we create projects that are broadly supported and meet a range of needs?” The collaborative Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) approach is an answer to that question. With the CSS approach, interdisciplinary teams work with public and agency stakeholders to tailor solutions to the setting; preserve scenic, aesthetic, historic, and environmental resources; and maintain safety and mobility. The goal of FHWA’s CSS program is to deliver a program of transportation projects that is responsive to the unique character of the communities it serves. In short, CSS supports livable communities and sustainable transportation.

A team including our own Gary Toth and Aurash Khawarzad recently led a CSS team in re-thinking Denver’s Brighton Boulevard, which was chosen as one of four pilot sites in the CSS Champions program. Brighton Boulevard currently serves as a busy arterial connection between downtown Denver and its eastern suburbs. The road is surrounded mostly by industrial properties, and tensions have arisen as the city moves forward with plans to redevelop the corridor into a more walkable, livable area.

As the desire to create more multi-use neighborhoods becomes increasingly pervasive, more and more cities will be facing the same kinds of challenges that Denver is facing on Brighton Boulevard. Above is a new video, produced for PPS by Khawarzad, that illustrates how the CSS process works directly with local stakeholders to reconcile conflicting needs. If you think that your community could benefit from this approach, email gtoth@pps.org.

Gary Toth in NYC

In this new StreetFilm, PPS’ Senior Director of Transportation Initiatives, Gary Toth explains Floating Parking and Bike Buffer Zones.  This new, contested street feature confers many benefits- and not just for cyclists.

In fact, floating parking and bike lanes can actually change the way a street is experienced. They slow traffic and make the sidewalk more livable.  And floating parking does this in a way that doesn’t involve a lot of tax payer dollars to build infrastructure. These are low-cost interventions that can turn a street into a community place.

“Floating Parking” & Bike Buffer Zone in Separated Bike Lanes from Streetfilms on Vimeo.