Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities
Whether voting to expand transit service to underserved communities or selecting transportation projects partially based on the health benefits they could bring, forward-looking public- and private-sector leaders are finding new ways to utilize transportation dollars in metro areas to improve the health of their residents and give them access to greater opportunities — bringing tangible economic benefits to their communities along the way.
Over the course of the last few years, T4America has produced a number of guidebooks, reports, and case studies to tell these stories, share the lessons learned, and provide guidance for other metro areas trying to do the same. You can find all of those resources here in one place.
Building Healthy and Prosperous Communities (2017)
Places that have made biking and walking from place to place a safe, convenient, and enticing choice have produced positive impacts on businesses, jobs, and revenue. When it’s safer and more convenient for people to walk or bicycle as part of their regular routine, more people get the amount of physical activity that science proves they need to reduce their risk of certain chronic diseases. How have regions successfully brought these projects to fruition? How are they integrating them into the processes of choosing what to build? How are they upending perhaps decades of radically different priorities to make these types of projects the norm?
This guidebook, produced in partnership with the American Public Health Association, tells these stories in detail, organized around seven key strategies. (Building Healthy And Prosperous Communities)
Measuring What We Value: Policies to prioritize public health and build prosperous regions (2017)
Scores of communities are planning, funding, and fast-tracking projects to make bicycling, walking, and riding transit safer, more convenient, and more realistic as travel options. But getting these projects planned, designed and built can be a challenge. How can regions bring more of these projects to fruition? How can they integrate them into the processes of choosing what to build? How can they upend perhaps decades of radically different priorities to make these types of projects the norm?
This paper outlines four policy levers that metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) have at their disposal to help increase and improve active transportation projects to meet the demand, decrease health disparities, increase access to opportunities, and strengthen local economies — with specific short real-life stories to go with each one. (Measuring What We Value: Policies to prioritize public health and build prosperous regions)
Planning for a Healthier Future (2016)
Cities and regions around the country face important choices about how to use limited resources to promote healthy communities and provide a great quality of life for all of their residents. This more complex resource about the nuts and bolts of performance measures helps metro areas find ways to use them to improve public health, address social equity concerns, and advance environmental quality.
This report goes a step beyond the new federally required performance measures by laying out additional measures that enable MPOs and regions to understand the health impacts of transportation and land use decisions within three other dimensions: physical activity, traffic safety, and exposure to air pollution.
Improving Health & Opportunities case studies (2015)
With transportation funding tighter than ever, citizens increasingly want to know: How will we choose what to build with our limited transportation dollars? Will we be better off after spending our money on these transportation projects? Will my kids be able to safely walk or bike to school? Can more of our region’s residents get to work easier and more affordably? Will our air be cleaner?
Here are eight quickly digestible stories of places, people and organizations aiming to improve the health, access to opportunity and overall quality of life for their residents.
The Innovative MPO (2014)
The last several years have seen a surge in innovative thinking and practice among metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) nationwide, and their work inspired this guidebook to help MPO staff, board members, and civic leaders find innovative ways to make communities prosper. The Innovative MPO offers a range of new ideas in planning, programming, technical analysis and community partnership, from those that cost little in staff time or dollars to more complex and expensive undertakings.
MPOs can push the envelope and innovate — whether to stretch public resources, achieve multiple benefits with a transportation dollar or simultaneously advance regional and economic development priorities. This new guidebook provides ideas how.
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