Transportation For America Watch the recap discussion of "Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities"

Watch the recap discussion of “Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities”

21 Dec 2017 | Posted by Mae Hanzlik | 0 Comments | metro planning organizations, metropolitan planning organizations, mpo, public health

Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities: How Metro Areas are Building More and Better Bicycling and Walking Projects identifies ways that metro planning agencies are planning, funding and building more and better walking and bicycling projects in their communities. To learn more, download the guidebook, view the recording of the webinar below, or read some of the questions answered by the presenters.

On December 11, Transportation for America hosted a webinar discussion highlighting the eight strategies covered in the guidebook:

Design guidance for bicycling and walking projects
Complete Streets policies and programs
Bicycle and walking data collection
Performance measures
Dedicated funding for bicycling and walking projects
Improving walking and bicycling connections to public transportation and essential destinations
Grassroots community engagement
Understanding the public health impacts of transportation behaviors.

In the guidebook each of these eight strategy areas are explained through in-depth, technical case studies of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) across the country who have done this work, navigated barriers, and succeeded.

Joining the discussion were representatives from three of the MPOs featured in the guidebook. Cortney Geary from the Chattanooga-Hamilton County/North Georgia Transportation Planning Organization shared about their “Community to Region” performance measures framework which has helped prioritize multimodal projects for federal funding. Daniel Kaempff from Metro in Portland, Oregon shared how Metro has improved the design of walking and bicycling projects to encourage active transportation and keep people safe. And Jeff Pollack from the Corpus Christi MPO discussed the development of the region’s customized Bicycle Mobility Network plan and extensive community engagement process.

Want to learn more?

Check out the following resources to learn how to make more progress in building more and better projects to encourage walking and biking:

First, don’t forget to dig into the thirteen case studies covered in the guidebook, Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities: How Metro Areas are Building More and Better Bicycling and Walking Projects.
Learn more about four key policy levers metro areas can use to improve active transportation projects and decrease health disparities with the Measuring What We Value policy report.
When it comes to performance measures more broadly, check out some of the innovative DOTs and MPOs experiencing early successes in measuring the performance of their transportation system and making smart investments in this report.

Stay tuned

In 2018 we’ll take a deep dive into a handful of the case studies featured in this guidebook. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get more technical questions answered by your MPO peers and experts.

Questions and answers

For those of you who really want to dive in deep, we went back and obtained detailed answers from our presenters to some of the questions that we weren’t able to answer during the webinar. You can view them here.