Struggling to adapt to a nation that relies less on automobiles, the U.S. Department of Transportation is turning to cities, pioneers of the complete streets movement, to help it stay relevant and funded as people shift to bicycles, public transit, and other modes of transportation.
"Unfortunately we pay for our budget by having people buy and burn gasoline," Beth Osborne, the deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy, told about 200 city officials and planners gathered at the Complete Streets Symposium in Chicago this morning.
"What's great for our budget is to have them sitting in traffic in a gas guzzling car. That is clearly not the outcome that anybody wants. As people drive less, our budget is constrained. So that's part of the reason people are looking for operational and technological solutions. However, there's also a cultural change within the field."
Transportation planners have noticed a shift in the population away from automobile use (Nate Silver has noticed it too), and are designing streets to accommodate, and sometimes favor, other modes of transportation.
This year, for example, the Chicago Department of Transportation adopted this new policy statement:
"All transportation projects and programs, from scoping to maintenance, will favor pedestrians first, then transit riders, cyclists, and automobiles."
The statement appears in the city's Complete Streets Guidelines (pdf).
Osborne offered this definition of complete streets:
Complete streets are streets that are designed to support the movement of people. And you might ask, isn't that what most streets are designed to do? No. Most streets are designed to support the movement of vehicles. People move in many ways. They move in vehicles, they move in transit, they move on bicycles and they move in a pair of sneakers, and a complete street can support people in any of the ways they move around."
The Department of Transportation wants to follow Americans to other modes of transportation, with cities in tow, and support them there, but it has long relied upon automobile-based planning, funding, and performance metrics.
"We can do this in a way that looks at every street as if it's a limited-access highway and worry about how many vehicles use it and how they move," Osborne said, "or we can look at the corridor in terms of everybody it accommodates, but that's much harder data to collect."
Osborne knows the data exists. To some degree, data underlies the shift of people out of automobiles. Smart phones access data that help people find car sharing vehicles, track buses and trains, find bike sharing stations, find directions for walking.
Many city transportation officials already are working with that data.
"You all may be the answer to how we count the movement of people," Osborne told the gathering. "Right now we know how to count the movement of vehicles. But how we count people is a more complex issue. We have to find a way to do it in a budget constrained times."
And Osborne dangled an incentive before city officials and planners.
"But if we're counting vehicles, our investment is going to be very focused on vehicles. If we count people, the investment shifts, and it's more about the movement of people whether they're in a vehicle or not. You all probably have the answer to how we do this in a cost effective way."
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