The Great American Dream of cruising down the parkway, zipping from here to there at any time has given way to a true nightmare that is destroying the environment, costing billions and deeply impacting our personal well-being.
Jeffrey Tumlin’s new book titled Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools For Creating Vibrant, Healthy, And Resilient Communities offers easy-to-understand, clearly explained tips and techniques that will allow us to quite literally take back our roads.
The author argues that developing sustainable is the most important environmental concern of the twenty-first century.
However, while other planning-related disciplines have already joined forces to meet new sustainability challenges — for example, the LEED Neighborhood Development standard — transportation has not kept pace.
Instead, transportation planning often defaults to a 1950s mindset, still favoring auto-oriented, one-size-fits-all solutions.
Sustainable Transportation Planning brings the discipline up to date, offering a big-picture approach to transportation systems.
Using clear, nontechnical language, this guide provides step-by-step instructions for implementing smart transportation concepts in both large and small communities.
Making this material accessible opens the door to greater participation in transportation planning by design and policy professionals, as well as citizen activists.
The text also helps transportation professionals better understand and align their discipline within the broader movement toward sustainable urbanism.
This work highlights:
Consideration of bike, pedestrian, automobile, and mass transit modes, as well as how these modes interrelate
Applicability at varying scales, from a downtown street to a neighborhood to a regional network
Case studies that look at exemplary projects across North America
Detailed measures of success for both individual transportation modes and entire systems
Additional discussion of parking, station design, and congestion management
Working from a comprehensive definition of sustainability — one that encompasses economic, ecological, and social vitality — Sustainable Transportation Planning is a sourcebook for understanding and implementing the full range of modern community transportation systems.