Public transportation provides an affordable choice for personal mobility and freedom for people from every walk of life. We hope you find our site developed by the American Public Transportation Association easy to navigate and the information useful as we show you how public transportation is on the move in the 21st century.
To strengthen and improve public transportation, APTA serves and leads its diverse membership through advocacy, innovation and information sharing. APTA and its members and staff work to ensure that public transportation is available and accessible for all Americans in communities across the country.
We wrote this guide to introduce creative placemaking to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.
Transportation for America is a broad coalition of housing, business, environmental, public health, transportation, equitable development, and other organizations. We're seeking to align our national, state, and local transportation policies with an array of issues like economic opportunity, climate change, energy security, health, housing and community development. Together we can realize a better transportation system that works for all Americans.
APTA members are public organizations that are engaged in the areas of bus, paratransit, light rail, commuter rail, subways, waterborne passenger services, and high-speed rail. Members also include large and small companies who plan, design, construct, finance, supply, and operate bus and rail services worldwide. Government agencies, metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation, academic institutions, and trade publications are also part of our membership.
Federal-aid Simplified. Understanding the Essentials. More and more, transportation agencies must pursue better, faster and smarter ways of doing business. Federal-aid Essentials offers a central online library of informational videos and resources, designed specifically for local public agencies. Each video addresses a single topic-condensing the complex regulations and requirements of the Federal-aid Highway Program into easy-to-understand concepts and illustrated examples.
Our goal is to advance urban sustainability and shared prosperity through initiatives in transportation, water, climate, and public policy. We coach city leaders, advise decision makers, and find new ways to solve challenges.
StreetPlan.net is a free web-based drag & drop tool for creating Complete Streets in just minutes. StreetPlan analyzes your design as you make it, giving you Red / Yellow / Green Best Practice guidance from "Designing Walkable Thoroughfares," a joint publication of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for New Urbanism (ITE and CNU). You can also start from templates designed by NACTO.
"Rethinking the Automobile" is a project created by livable streets advocate Mark Gorton. Its goal is to raise awareness around the negative impact of the automobile on our world.
Through public events and media campaigns, Rethinking the Automobile reveals how policies that prioritize the automobile destroy public space in our cities and towns and have created a dangerous and unsustainable world.
The Street Plans Collaborative is an urban planning, design, and research-advocacy firm. We strive to create high-quality public spaces, and believe that the key to reversing the harmfulmn effects of suburban sprawl is to promote compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. We thrive on working with our clients, partners, and other likeminded organizations to improve the quality and function of the built environment. We seek to increase the effectiveness of multi-modal transportation as a means to creating more competitive and sustainable 21st century towns and cities.
The TOD Technical Assistance Initiative is a project of the Federal Transit Administration administered by Smart Growth America that provides on-the-ground and online technical assistance to support transit-oriented development, improve access to public transportation, and build new economic opportunities and pathways to employment for local communities. Learn more about the project >>
Los Angeles County is an epicenter for innovation in aerospace. From the well-known aerospace and defense corporations like Boeing to the newly emerging space transport companies of SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, many important innovations are taking place right here in L.A. County as we migrate our national space program from the public to the private sector. Join us as we hear from these leaders on how they are transforming the aerospace and space travel industries and launching them to new heights.
Founded in 1999, PolicyLink connects the work of people on the ground to the creation of sustainable communities of opportunity that allow everyone to participate and prosper. Such communities offer access to quality jobs, affordable housing, good schools, transportation, and the benefits of healthy food and physical activity.
Guided by the belief that those closest to the nation's challenges are central to finding solutions, PolicyLink relies on the wisdom, voice, and experience of local residents and organizations. Lifting Up What Works is our way of focusing attention on how people are working successfully to use local, state, and federal policy to create conditions that benefit everyone, especially people in low-income communities and communities of color. We share our findings and analysis through our publications, website and online tools, convenings, national summits, and in briefings with national and local policymakers.
Our work is grounded in the conviction that equity - just and fair inclusion - must drive all policy decisions.
Copenhagen and Melbourne are among cities seen as being highly livable. Most of the work was done in cold economic times. Creating Public spaces can be the least expensive, quickest, the most visible with the greatest impact for the greatest number of people that a city can do. Lyon did this in an economic downturn.
Copenhagen Streets: Sidewalks, 2 proper bicycle lands, street trees, 2 lanes for 2 way traffic and a substantial median to facilitate crossing the street. "We do not have to think and act as 1960's traffic engineers for ever - times are changing and traffic engineers are by now much smarter"
Copehagen in its 2009 New Public Life Policy strove to the "WORLD'S FINEST CITY FOR PEOPLE" among the goals having everyone to walk 20% more by 2015!!!
Between 1994 and 2004 Melbourne City Center saw increases in Pedestrian traffic on weekdays by over 40%, Pedestrian traffic in the evenings by over 100% and stationary activities by over 200 to 300%
"Compared to most other mindsets, Vancouver's thinking has been counterintuitive because we rank walking at the top of the list followed by bicycling, transit and goods movement. The auto is last.
The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented byProfessor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects,Copenhagen. This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.
The Model Street Design Manual was created during a 2-day writing charrette, which brought together national experts in living streets concepts. This effort was funded by the Department of Health and Human Services through the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation.