National Complete Streets Coalition and Smart Growth America recently released a new tool to help communities look into developing Complete Streets plan.
What are Complete Streets?
Complete Streets is a development concept based on the idea of how safe and walkable a community is. Dangerous By Design 2019 is a recent study that shows the level of safe walkability communities around the US have. Adopting a Complete Streets plan for a community has a number of other improvements as well, including improvements in: local economies, health, environment, equity, and safety.
“Complete Streets are designed and operated to prioritize safety, comfort, and access to destinations for all people who use the street, especially people who have experienced systemic underinvestment or whose needs have not been met through a traditional transportation approach… Complete Streets make it easy to cross the street, walk to shops, jobs, and schools, bicycle to work, and move actively with assistive devices. They allow buses to run on time and make it safe for people to walk or move actively to and from train stations” (The Benefits of Complete Streets).
New Tool
Deciding how to implement a Complete Streets program has been seen as a costly endeavor. Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, have worked to develop a software tool which will help communities better and more cheaply evaluate past, current, and future projects along with their impact. As they note on their website, while the tools is not entirely compressive to preserve maximum applicability across almost various communities, it does help provide accurate estimates of a project’s impact.
