by Tanya Snyder, DC Streets Blog
…
Yesterday, a bipartisan group of six governors and ex-governors celebrated the new support of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities – the collaboration of HUD, DOT, and EPA — for the Governor’s Institute. This kind of collaborative work, among federal agencies and with the states, is “common sense writ large,” said U.S. DOT Deputy Secretary John Porcari at the event. “But it wasn’t done in the past.”
States are where the rubber hits the road, he said, and the federal government needs to help them take smart action.
The Institute’s staff advises states on everything from agriculture and economic development to transportation and housing. They hold workshops in states, hosted by the governors themselves, to give specific advice tailored to the needs and particularities of that places.
Its prescriptions are well grounded in the smart growth philosophy. For example, the Institute’s 14 policies for transportation include strategic planning, a “fix-it-first” approach, and complete streets. They evaluate communities based on street grid connectivity and transit-oriented development, not old-school criteria like vehicle level-of-service.
…
But the economic question goes far deeper than just temporary construction jobs. As William Fulton, vice president for policy and programs at Smart Growth America and former mayor of Ventura, California, blogged this week on CNN.com, “Where businesses go, where houses go, where roads go, where sidewalks go, where farms and natural spaces go – all of these things collectively affect a community’s economic performance and the cost of providing services there. Put things closer together, the services cost less. Put things farther from each other, the services cost more for the jurisdiction and its taxpayers.”
…
https://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/08/02/governors-get-on-board-with-smart-growth/
From A Governors’ Guide to Growth and Development
…
Transportation departments generally rank the performance of roads by their level-of-service, but employing this standard can inadvertently discourage or block development in urban core areas, because they typically rank low on standard level-of-service measures. Many jurisdictions, for example, have responded to growing traffic congestion by developing performance standards to ensure that traffic speeds are maintained as areas become more developed. But these standards ignore the role that walking, biking, and transit play in more densely developed areas. Design decisions based on high level-of-service performance measures can end up serving only the motorist at the expense of the very communities that the road is supposed to serve. Decisions made only for the peak hour may tune the roadway to work well for motorists during those hours, but render the road over-designed for the rest of the day and ineffective for all other users. To remedy this, state transportation departments should review how they apply level-of-service standards and, if necessary, work with local governments to revise how the level-of-service is measured.
…