With 384 municipalities in the NJTPA region, communities often face many of the same transportation challenges. Rather than solving those problems 384 different times, they can learn from what has worked and what has not in communities across the country.
That was a key message Ryan Russo, executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), shared with the NJTPA Board of Trustees at its September 14 meeting. Russo highlighted how communities can draw on the experiences of others to improve streets, expand transportation choices and avoid repeating mistakes.
“Find out of what the successes are, someone has tried something and it’s worked – or someone has tried something and that hasn’t worked, and you don’t want your staff making the mistakes that someone else has already learned from.”
The executive director of NACTO for the past two years, Russo presented, “Better Streets for Every Community: How NACTO and Its Members Turn Ideas Into Action.”
North Jersey moves in many ways: More than one in eight people in the NJTPA’s 13-county region take transit to work – more than three times the national share – while 61 percent drive alone.
“You have this job of thinking about the highways, the trains, the bridges – really big-ticket items – but that local street, that intersection, that crosswalk, it’s really the building block of everything when it comes to mobility and what we want people to have as an outcome that they can safely get to the things they need to do to thrive. To be able access opportunity, school, jobs, connection,” he told Board members.
Affordable transportation expands access to jobs and daily needs. “To not have transportation, which is often the second biggest budget item in a household, eat into that budget so [people] can spend money on the things they really need – food, opportunity, education – is really important,” Russo said. “You have such a diverse and challenging sort of region here that that investment in multi-modalism really pays off as it trickles down and affects people’s budget.”
NACTO’s membership includes more than 100 transportation departments and transit agencies, with the City of Hoboken the only member among 384 municipalities in the NJTPA’s region.
Said Russo: “384 communities should not solve the same problems 384 times that someone else has figured out. This is what the NACTO community” is about, he said.
“That’s what a community of practice is really about and what can give you kind of a head start in doing the work of improving your street: Learning from the experience, including the mistakes, of folks who came before them,” Russo said.
Peer networks, roundtables, and working groups give practitioners direct access to colleagues not only confronting similar challenges but also new ones, such as robotaxis and urban delivery by bike. Russo noted recent roundtables on curb management in Santa Monica, California, and shared micromobility in Tucson, Arizona.
“We know we’re in a dynamic and changing world and environment with all the technology and autonomous vehicles, and so, robotaxis, are hitting many of our members. They’re working with their fire department and police department trying to react to this change coming down the pike. What we do is make sure that the next city that’s coming doesn’t have to go through the pain in the same way of the ones who did it first.”
NACTO design guides
That experience becomes practical guidance in the form of NACTO publications, such as the Urban Street Design Guide and Transit Street Design Guide. Guidance goes beyond street design, offering advice for leaders of communities that have a plan and work with communities, Russo said, how to resource staff and strategically approach the development of providing a safe cycling system in your community.
Despite the perception that NACTO is about big cities, Russo said the organization has grown to include lots of communities that look like the diverse communities of North Jersey and solutions that are meant for the local streets in many different context, whether suburban, medium-sized cities, or downtown.
“We recognize that you’re solving for problems in different context and our guidance recognizes that. Ultimately, multimodal streets really belong everywhere, and you all have recognized that in your work” he told Board members. “As you balance the needs of the regional highway system, rail system and bridges that are aging, keeping your eye on that ball of the benefits from giving people choices, saving them money. Even for the people who must take a car for their trips, they’re benefiting when there’s a system that has other people walking, biking, using public transit to get around.”
A recording of the September 14 presentation can be found on the NJTPA YouTube channel.