Context Sensitive Design for WTS

On February 1, 2008, the Colorado Chapter of Advancing Women in Transportation (WTS) held a breakfast seminar entitled Creating Walkable Urban Thoroughfares with Context Sensitive Design at the Oxford Hotel in Denver. The seminar was designed to address tools that cities can apply to urban thoroughfares that they would like to “fix.”

Are these streets an untapped opportunity for neighborhood revitalization or simply a lost cause? How can transportation professionals impact the function and form of streets to efficiently move person and goods while at the same time protecting or in many cases creating a sense of place along the way?

Guest speakers answering these questions were Dan Burden of Glatting Jackson, Brian Bochner of the Texas Transportation Institute, and Jim Charlier of Charlier Associates.

Dan’s presentation on “Walkability” introduced the concept of CSS and addressed details of place making, complete streets and multi-modal intersections.
Brian’s presentation, entitled “Context Sensitive Solutions: A Process to Achieve Better Results,” focused on an example from Fort Worth, TX, and introduced the new CNU/ITE manual.
Jim’s presentation, entitled “Great Streets: Beyond Traffic Capacity,” addressed why so many of our streets are not great, what makes a street great, and why should we care.

(Scroll to the bottom of the page for PDFs of the presentations)

Following the presentations, the seminar’s Q&A focused on related topics of road diets, economic development indicators and complete streets policies. Links to studies and publications referenced by the speakers are provided below:

Article on road diet experiences from several cities nationwide, from Walkable Communities
Safety results of implementing road diets, from the Iowa DOT
The economic benefits of walkable communities, from the Local Government Commission
The latest on multi-modal approaches and complete street policies, from the national Complete Streets Coalition
Charlier Associates’ Great Streets website created for East-West Gateway in St. Louis, MO
APA’s list of streets that are Great Places in America
Where to obtain the ITE/CNU “Blue Book” on Context Sensitive Design bound hard copy or PDF

Presentations

	Burden_-_Context_Sensitive_Solutions.pdf	33.09 MB

	Bochner_-_WTS_Denver_020108.pdf	2.30 MB

	Charlier_-_Great_Streets.pdf	33.45 MB