Green Growth Cascadia » ITE

Green Streets & Highways Conference – ASCE Nov 14-17

jacutanz — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:40:35 +0000

SAVE THE DATE

ASCE is hosting the Green Streets and Highways Conference in Denver, Colorado on November 14-17, 2010. As the first conference on this topic it will serve as an interactive conference on the state of the art and how to achieve sustainable outcomes.

From the conference website the conference is for :

…”transportation engineers (road and bridge designers, traffic operations, drainage, materials, and construction), environmental analysts, conservation planners, landscape architects, transportation planners, and transportation policy makers – those professionals on the frontline of improving the performance and sustainability of our streets and highways”

The conference will feature a coordinated session with T & DI and ITE.

Be there for this first of it’s kind conference.

American Idle (NOT American IDOL)? – Go for a walk!

jacutanz — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:30:01 +0000

Crystal Bowersox - my pick for American Idol...

Ahhh Spring is in the air and young people’s fancy turns to thoughts of …walking! The pile of data and statistics indicating all the positive benefits of walking is growing. Many studies indicate communities where people walk (and communities are planned, designed and built to encourage walking) are also those with lower rates of obesity.

From Bicycling and Walking in the United States 2010 Benchmarking Report

A key Report in 2005 from TRB, TRB Special Report 282, Does the Built Environment Influence Physical Activity: Examining the Evidence, broadly reviewed trends and links between physical activity, health, transportation, and land use. Another one by the Centers for Disease Control in 2009 titled Recommended Community Strategies and Measurements to Prevent Obesity in the United States notes the growing epidemic of childhood obesity and strategies communities can take including promoting walking (especially to school) through planning design and construction of safe walk routes.

Hi to Low Ranking for Biking and Walking

The GOOD NEWS is that for our Cascadian communities (and tuly the west coast), our states and cities are doing a fine job in providing safe walking and biking environments. As they say “It doesn’t count if you don’t count it.” Monitoring performance is critical for measuring success and finding deficiencies. In an update of their 2007 report, a new (2010) Benchmark study released by the Alliance for Walking and Biking and funded by the Centers for Disease Control, utilizes broad inputs from a wide range of agencies and advocacy groups to assess and evaluate walking and biking in America. They even included vetting by technical organizations like the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu scored well in results (people actually walking and biking). This land mark report sets the stage for establishing deficiencies in policy, safety and investment. Plus it includes cool links to bike maps, advocacy groups and complete streets policies.

So as your March Madness subsides, get off the couch and go on out for a walk —- and take your friends with you. Great job Cascadia “walking the walk”.

Walk This Way — New Webinar — 2010-03-30

jacutanz — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:30:49 +0000

Sponsored by Context SensitiveSolutions.org (CSS) This free webinar is brought to you by the FHWA, in partnership with the Texas Transportation Institute, Congress for New Urbanism, and Project for Public Spaces. The webinar will be on Tuesday, March 30, 2010, from 10:00 – 11:30 PM Pacfiic

The webinar will cover the brand new, just published recommended practice from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) titled Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach, along with a CSS case study in Elgin, Illinois. The case study covers a pilot project in Elgin, which has 19th century gridded streets, post WWII low density auto dependent development and new underdeveloped areas. The presenters worked with local officials in restoring portions of the old grid, retrofitting the post war sprawl and planning yet to be developed areas to include greater connectivity.