A complete street in Charlotte, NC

Your tax dollars paid for it so you deserve a report. (I stayed with relatives and biked and bussed to the conference to save taxpayer money.)

Things I learned (you can see I chose a transportation heavy workshop track):

- At a complete streets workshop I learned that according to AARP over half of seniors say intersections where they live are not safe to cross and they would like to see their city adopt a complete streets policy. As the populations ages a huge demographic shift is coming and “engineers are not prepared for it” according to a presenter I heard.

- Vehicle Miles Travelled or VMT (how much we drive per car) is going to be a measurement of increasing importance to transportation policy in the future. In the past few decades the increase in VMT has greatly exceeded population growth. Interestingly, there has been more VMT growth in discretionary/recreational trips than in job commuting trips. One of the best ways to address this issue is to get more people biking and walking for short trips.
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- There is a new effort from the federal government to make sure new transportation infrastructure doesn’t bypass low-income neighborhoods. I heard presentations from Houston, Phoenix, and Minneapolis about how activists worked to make sure poor neighborhoods weren’t skipped over for light rail stops. In Spokane I want to make sure that low-income neighborhoods like East Central are connected to the U-District.
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- “The recognition is that light industrial areas are critical.” Cities can’t afford to lose locations for light manufacturing jobs. That’s what we heard from Seattle transit planners who worked to optimize the city’s new light rail planning.
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- Seattle, with 8% growth in cycling for several years now, has lots that Spokane can crib from in terms of bicycle policy. The Cascade Bicycle Club says the two biggest barriers to more people riding bikes are concerns about safety and travel time. Some numbers: 30% of our population can’t drive and 10% of all trips involve biking or walking yet these transportation modes get 1% of all transportation funding. Cascade Bicycle Club thinks that travel lanes for cars don’t need to be bigger than 10 feet and they are evaluating which streets are best for sharrows. (Markings that indicate bikes and cars share a lane. You can see them on SE Blvd.)
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- Some folks at the conference had complaints about implementation of smart growth strategies. I heard a woman from Portland say that often the built environment falls short of the visioning the city has done to support bicycles and pedestrians. I heard several people challenge the Washington State Department of Transportation to back up its talk of support public transit and bike/ped with more funding and programs.
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- Many municipalities are doing very innovative things to address increasing disposal costs for storm water, including changing the way building permits are issued to favor redevelopment and infill over new development and Cincinnati is even considering creating a whole new lake in the city limits to handle storm water.
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That’s a smattering of what was presented. I left feeling that our city is doing many things right in regards to smart growth, but that we have a long ways to catch up and be competitive with other cities in the country and that we will be left in the dust on federal funding if we don’t do a better job of integrating our land use, housing, and transportation planning.