Transportation reforms on track

CNU summit in Boulder showcases Project for Transportation Reform. The nearly 200 transportation enthusiasts who gathered in Boulder November 17-18 witnessed the evolution of CNU’s annual transportation summit into a showcase for the organization’s ambitious Project for Transportation Reform. Chaired by two emerging CNU leaders, architect Marcy McInelly and engineer Norman Garrick, the newly created project grows out of CNU’s Transportation Task Force and reflects innovative work connecting roads, transit, and other transportation networks with the walkable, livable, traditional urban forms of cities and towns. From reintroducing street types such as the boulevard and the avenue into professional practice to removing damaging elevated freeways from the hearts of cities and to improving the analytical methods that determine what kind of transportation systems get built, CNU and its members are advancing groundbreaking reforms. The November summit was hosted by Charlier Associates, a transportation planning firm, and Go Boulder, a transportation program of Boulder’s Public Works Department. The agenda focused on two categories of reform that are central to the new project: street and place design and transportation modeling. One day before the summit, CNU held a workshop focused on understanding and using the CNU-ITE street design manual. Presentations focused on the content of the manual and showed how to implement complete street designs for a range of Transect zones. Local presenters such as Martha Roskowski of the City of Boulder and Peter Park, Denver’s top city planner, showed how the manual can be implemented in Boulder and along major thoroughfares such as Colfax Avenue in Denver. For more on the manual, see the article on page 1. The latest reforms The summit kicked off with an outline from McInelly and Garrick on the latest reforms and an explanation that the summit tackled street and place design and modeling as major themes because those issues are often the obstacles that prevent new ideas in transportation from getting implemented. After reviewing recent updates on the 20-year Boulder master plan, participants toured downtown Boulder and saw two Charter Award winning projects: the 15th and Pearl Street mixed-use parking garage and the Eighth and Pearl mixed-use building designed by tour guide John Wolff. The tour also showcased transportation improvements such as contra-flow bike lanes, specialized crossing treatments, detailed parking meter descriptions and bus routes with names matching their function such as Hop, Skip, Jump, Bolt and Stampede. Back at the summit, the group dove into street and place design reforms. Elizabeth Macdonald presented her firm’s contemporary multiway boulevard designs in Vancouver and Oakland. With their middle lanes for through traffic and side lanes for local traffic, mutliway boulevards accommodate considerable traffic volumes as well as vital storefront retail and mixed-use activity. “Multiway boulevards exemplify a new way of thinking about streets,” said McInelly. “Hearing some of the modern applications of that design and speaking one-on-one with one of the national experts was one of the highlights of the summit.” Shifting the group’s attention to transportation modeling reform, transportation engineers Norm Marshall and Lucy Gibson of Vermont-based Smart Mobility described shortcomings of conventional modeling methods used by many metropolitan planning organizations and explained the advantages of the alternatives they are developing. Marshall discussed how “the 3 Ds” — Density, Diversity and Design Impacts — aren’t fully accounted for in most typical MPO mode-choice modeling. A lack of variables in calculating land-use patterns leads to failures in predicting transit ridership. CNU President and CEO John Norquist and CNU Vice Chair Jacky Grimshaw explained how changes in modeling in Seattle and Buffalo support the case that elevated freeways should be replaced by boulevards, which carry significant traffic while adding to a city’s economic health. Transportation experts Dan Burden and Michael Ronkin added their ideas on taming traffic through road diets. These presentations answered common questions from traditional engineers about how to accommodate traffic without making streets wider. Summit participants worked in small groups to advance specific new urbanist transportation reforms. Several topics arose as potentially worthy of new initiatives, including multiway boulevards, the street network, emergency responders, and follow up on the CNU-ITE street design manual. Check www.cnu.org for updates on their work. Go Boulder staff sought the input of summit attendees on their street designs for an automobile-oriented section of 30th Street in Boulder, which is due to become a major transit hub with light-rail and bus-rapid-transit connections. CNU members toured the area with local officials to figure out how to retrofit the street and street network to support transit-oriented development. New urbanists sketched out potential designs to transform what the CNU-ITE manual calls a C-3 context zone to a more intensively developed C-4 or C-5 zone. Many of the proposals included road diets, reducing the travel lanes from 4 to 2. Marni Ratzel, Boulder’s Bike and Pedestrian Planner, was pleased with the outcome saying, “we came away with better ideas about how to complete the grid and look at it more as a system.” Attracting public officials from more than a dozen Colorado cities and from as far as Flagstaff, Arizona, and Ventura, California, the summit showed the Project for Transportation Reform is making an impact on the professionals who drive implementation in fast-growing areas of the West. “Elected officials need to change the climate of engineering to focus on the people who live and work in the community,” said Terri Musser of Charlier Associates. “If elected officials are committed to that, they can set up a different set of problems for engineers — instead of focusing their engineers on moving cars, they can focus them on a different set of problems to help create that community.”