Strong Towns

Rural areas pose a challenge for parking reform advocates: It’s difficult to reduce the amount of valuable space consumed by parking when a lot of people regularly come to town in their cars and need a place to park. Here are a few possible responses from this year’s Local-Motive session on parking: 🚲 Make sure that other modes of transportation, such as biking, are convenient and safe, so people can reach town using those instead of driving. 🅿️ Consolidate available parking into a single lot on the edge of town, so people can still park while the rest of the town’s land is used in more productive ways that improve walkability. 🏘️ Work with form-based elements to give the town an appealing character and encourage people to move into town. As the town thickens up and fewer people need to drive in, you can gradually replace parking with more productive uses. To learn more, check out the full session on the Strong Towns Academy: https://buff.ly/4dG4chB

Did you know that cities can win awards for their budgets and have great credit scores—even while being in dire financial straits? Read more in this piece, republished from Strong Towns member Michel Durand-Wood's blog Dear Winnipeg: https://buff.ly/4gDkBpA

Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network notes that parking mandates rob small businesses of the opportunity to fail or succeed of their own accord. To that point, he believes small business owners disproportionately shoulder the costs and consequences of minimum parking requirements.

What cities can do to prevent traffic crashes: 1️⃣ Make safety a core responsibility. 2️⃣ Establish a Crash Response Team. 3️⃣ Establish a Crash Analysis Studio. 4️⃣ Use temporary traffic control devices for quick safety responses. 5️⃣ Update local street standards to prioritize safety instead of traffic speed. 6️⃣ Conduct bike and walk audits for all projects.

Save the date: The 2025 Strong Towns National Gathering will take place in Providence, RI, June 9-11! More announcements about speakers and the full agenda coming soon. Tickets will be released in late February 2025.

This holiday, give the gift of safer streets—places where your kids can bike to school, your friends can walk to the grocery store, and you don't have to get in a car to check off every item on your to-do list. Support the advocates who are painting crosswalks, putting cones at dangerous intersections, and showing up at city hall to ensure all of these changes become permanent. Support the Strong Towns movement and our Safe and Productive Streets campaign. buff.ly/415La1c

In August, New Jersey first responder Stephen Dunn, known on social media as The Biking Fireman, addressed his Instagram followers from the entrance to Lenape Park. The park houses a segment of the East Coast Greenway, the country’s longest biking and walking route. Where Steve stood, that route is bisected by the four-lane Kenilworth Boulevard. Behind him was a mangled bicycle, several police officers, and an uncertainty as to whether everyone involved in the evident crash was still alive. Steve was visibly enraged. “How do we accept this? It’s ridiculous,” he said in his post. “It’s a highway running through our community and this...this is what happens.”

There’s no silver bullet to fix North America’s epidemic of traffic violence. Instead, local leaders, both inside and outside of government, need to take prudent, thoughtful and purposeful steps to learn from the crashes happening in their communities and then put that knowledge to work in the pursuit of safer streets.

“Strong Towns advocates for all cities to accept some level of change while taking ‘radical neighborhood transformation off the table.’ This ‘grand bargain,’ as they put it — where single-family homes can transform at least into duplexes — aims to turn NIMBYs skeptical of development into more self-interested partners. Strong Towns also argues this approach will lead to more sustainable fiscal growth.” And this incremental, step-by-step change doesn’t have to be slow. Each small step can be taken on an everyday, ordinary scale — not just in big leaps.

Broomfield, Colorado, is experiencing an incredible amount of growth and is beginning the transition from a bedroom community to a thriving and sustainable urbanized environment. Delgadillo is using her position as a city council member to steer that growth in a healthy direction by pushing for reduced parking minimums and other reforms.