Agenda - Planning Commission - 04/04/2013

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SK THE AUTHOR JOIN US ONLINE! o online during the month of February to participat "Ask the Author" forum, an interactive feature of Zoning Carol Gould, AICP, and Mike Morehouse will be available questions about this article. Go to the APA website at WW planning.org and follow the links to the Ask the Authors From there, just submit your questions about the article using the e-mail link. The authors will reply, and Zoning Practice will post the answers cumulatively on the website for the benefit o subscribers. This feature will be available forsel Zoning Practice at announced times. After each o is closed, the answers will be saved in an on throu.h the APA Zonin• Practice web a• es. ected issues ' ' 0r I a senior project manager at Fitzgerald & . alliday Inc. Her 18 years of experience at FHI has been in the area of community planning with a focus on livable communities, transportation /land -use connections, public involvement, parking, and access management. ike Morehouse is a licensed professional engineer who leads FHI's obility Service line, which focuses on multimodal transportation lanning and engineering. In his work, Morehouse offers a rehensive perspective of transportation engineering that values lationshi • between vehicular mobility and placemaking. Additionally, streets are organized into a functional classification system, which is required for municipalities to be eligible for federal funding for road projects. In the federal -aid classification system, arteri- als, collectors, and local roads are defined to describe the purpose, or function, of these roads in terms of mobility and ac- cess. Often, roadway design standards are tied to functional classification and many design manuals tend to favor optimizing the public right -of -way for automobile mobility. Since functional classification does not take context, non -auto modes, and a number of other factors into consideration, the incor- poration of design elements for bicycles, pedestrians, and transit take a back seat to creating space for cars. Even as many communities look to bet- ter integrate land use with the transporta- tion system as part of defining what commu- nity character and mobility means for them, transportation funding is still predominantly awarded to projects for physical upgrades to the safety and capacity of roadways as mea- sured in LOS terms. So, even though more and more communities want public ways that are easily accessible, well connected by a variety of modes, and welcoming to pe- destrians, bicyclists, and transit users and to create neighborhoods that are places for people more so than cars, federal and state monies that have been the mainstay for funding public infrastructure have not been readily available to help communities meet those goals. Zoning, the primary means communities have to integrate private land use into the fabric of the community, is a significant opportunity to create public - private partnerships and make more holisti- cally designed streets possible. THE COMPLETE STREETS CONCEPT In the most basic sense, complete streets are streets for everyone. They are streets that are designed for people first and fore- most. This includes people driving in cars, walking on sidewalks and crossing the Dan Burden, Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, Inc. 4LBistro Motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders share complete streets in Santa Barbara, California. 1 ZONINGPRACTICE 2.13 AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION Ipage 3