Talking Headways Podcast: Designing City Streets for People

This week Corinne Kisner and Matthew Roe of the National Association of City Transportation Officials tell us about their influential series of street design guides — manuals that give transportation engineers “permission” to reorient streets so walking, biking, and transit come first. Listen in and learn how the guides are put together and how cities are using them to change their streets to prioritize people instead of cars.

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What's keeping cities from rolling out changes like this faster? NACTO wants to know. Photo: Nathan Roseberry (CDOT) via NACTO/Flickr

NACTO Wants to Find Out How Cities Can Design Better Streets, Faster

By Stephen Miller |
The National Association of City Transportation Officials, representing more than 50 urban transportation departments across the United States, is known for street design guides that prioritize walking, bicycling, and transit. Now the organization is turning its attention to the nuts-and-bolts of how city bureaucracies can implement these designs in a timely manner, so meaningful change can happen within our lifetimes.

A New Blueprint for Streets That Put Transit Front and Center

By Angie Schmitt |
The National Association of City Transportation Officials has released a new design guide to help cities prioritize transit on their streets. How can cities integrate bus rapid transit with protected bike lanes? How can bus stops be improved and the boarding process sped up? How should traffic signals be optimized to prioritize buses? The Transit Street Design Guide goes into greater […]

FHWA to Engineers: Go Ahead and Use City-Friendly Street Designs

By Tanya Snyder |
The heavyweights of American transportation engineering continue to warm up to design guides that prioritize walking, biking, and transit on city streets. On Friday, the Federal Highway Administration made clear that it endorses the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Street Design Guide, which features street treatments like protected bike lanes that you won’t find in […]

NACTO Previews a Progressive Design Guide for City Streets

By Ben Fried |
One of the interesting developments to come out of the National Association of City Transportation Officials “Designing Cities” conference (currently in its second day) was the announcement of a wide-ranging new design guide to be released next year. NACTO’s “Urban Streets Design Guide” will show how streets of every size can be re-oriented to prioritize […]

State DOT Engineers Say They’ll Do Better on Walking, Biking, Transit

By Angie Schmitt |
In a welcome sign from an industry group that has been slow to embrace street designs that prioritize walking, biking, and transit, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) released a statement last week saying it intends to “better address multi-modal issues.” AASHTO’s street design manuals are highly influential and lay out standards that many engineers […]