By Benjamin Fried

Sixty-five years ago, the village of Chocorua--nestled in New Hampshire's scenic White Mountains--found itself split in two. The main street was widened as part of a new state highway, easing the way for high volumes of traffic to pass through this small town of 900 people. Today, about 11,000 vehicles speed past Chocorua each day, and the village center is being slowly depleted of businesses and tenants.

"We can't walk around in our village anymore because it's simply not safe," says Erika Hunter, a Chocorua resident who has lobbied the New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT) to calm the speeding traffic. Indeed, local citizens aren't about to let their town center disappear. By partnering with NHDOT in a process facilitated by PPS, they are already working to restore a comfortable pedestrian environment and bring businesses back into the fold.

Chocorua may be smaller than average, but its story is representative of a new approach to transportation planning called "Context Sensitive Solutions," or CSS, that is gaining currency across the US. The central tenet of CSS is that communities should not be molded to the requirements of motor vehicle traffic alone--transportation should preserve the scenic, historic, and environmental resources of the places it serves.

"Go out, ask people what they want from their transportation system, and then do it."

This new approach questions some of the most fundamental assumptions of the culture of road building, and requires engineers 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.

According to PPS Senior Associate David Burwell, former president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, CSS is the third and most important stage in the transition of transportation agencies from a mission focus to a customer-service focus.

The first stage, known as "design and defend," predominated during the construction of the interstate highway system: Design the interstate segment and then defend it in a public hearing. The second stage, "manage and maintain," took shape as the interstate system neared completion and the increase in motor traffic led to new maintenance strategies. But in the effort to move more traffic more efficiently, projects carried out during these two stages often left places like Chocorua behind, struggling to recapture the vitality they once enjoyed.

"What CSS then brings us to is the third stage, which is 'ask and implement' -- go out, ask people what they want from their transportation system, and then do it," says Burwell. "'Ask and implement' is what you do when you want to tie the whole system together--rail, air, transit, bike/ped--and focus on community goals."

CSS is a natural fit for PPS's place-based approach. As CSS has been adopted in state after state, PPS has taken a leading role in developing a standard curriculum to train engineers how to use CSS principles in practice. To date, over a thousand traffic engineers in New Jersey, New York, California, and Wisconsin have benefited from PPS training.

The training begins with a one-day course where engineers and community participants go on a site visit and evaluate the problems and opportunities of different streets. The course seeks to change the way transportation problems are addressed so that community issues can be solved at the same time.

"CSS training is changing the whole mindset of transportation engineers," says PPS Vice President Steve Davies. "This means that engineers can work with local partners to solve transportaton problems faster, better, and cheaper."

The watershed moment came when the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) identified CSS as one of its "Vital Few Strategies." The influence of the FHWA is crucial, because it provides guidelines for state DOTs and the money to implement them. Its goal is to establish CSS training programs and projects on the ground in all 50 states by 2007, ensuring that CSS will become deeply rooted in the transportation profession, even in states that are "late adopters."

"I'm thrilled not just for us but for all of the United States."

A major part of the FHWA initiative is a web-based CSS resource center that PPS is currently developing. When completed, the website will enable the adoption of CSS practice by the broad transportation community--professionals, public officials, and laypeople interested in improving their local streets. The site also fills an essential need for engineers who would like to use CSS techniques, but have not received formal training.

In addition to the website, PPS and FHWA are working together as part of a unique collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS). The partnership seeks to apply CSS principles to gateway communities around major national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, which are often overrun with traffic from visiting tourists. Thanks to an amendment to the Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21), NPS can now pool its funds with FHWA to address the problems in these gateway communities.

"The result is better places, more opportunities for economic development in those communities, and also traffic management in the parks, so everybody wins," says Burwell.

By now you may be asking, "What exactly does CSS look like in practice?" In communities like Chocorua, it begins by listening to people about the problems they face.

"Trucks go through here about 55 mph because it doesn't look like there is anything going on," says Hunter. "There are no sidewalks. There are no lines drawn to delineate parking. Nothing."

As part of a project in nearby Littleton, New Hampshire, PPS came to Chocorua and spoke with residents and NHDOT design staff about inexpensive ways to introduce visual cues that would slow traffic. As a result of those meetings, NHDOT installed traffic cones down the center and sides of the highway, a simple experiment that will inform more permanent measures in the future. For now, local volunteers measure the change in traffic speed caused by the cones and report their findings to NHDOT.

Traffic cones may seem like a small step, and in fact that is a major reason for their success. "PPS's suggestions are so incremental, I think that they're pretty non-threatening," says Hunter. "They show ways of doing things that don't necessarily involve huge amounts of money from DOT."

With the cooperation of NHDOT, Hunter hopes to see permanent traffic-calming measures in Chocorua, followed by real sidewalks: "Then we'll have a downtown because people will want to locate their businesses here, and it's absolutely stunningly beautiful."

She also knows that what's happening in Chocorua is part of something bigger: "I'm thrilled not just for us but for all of the United States actually. We've needed this for a long time, and I think that it's a huge gift."