Editor’s note: The Blue Line has been running a serialized version of PLAN-Boulder County’s A Transportation Vision for Boulder. This is the final installment: Section 5, Recommendations. To read the entire paper, start with the Introduction.
![By Payton Chung from Chicago, USA (Shared street/boulevard) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.boulderblueline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Paris_-_Avenue_Daumesnilsm.jpg)
By Payton Chung from Chicago, USA (Shared street/boulevard) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Sections 1-4 of this paper presented the rationale for a new paradigm in transportation planning in Boulder. The recommendations that follow from those sections are offered below:
- Establish a rural-to-urban transect system for land use and transportation patterns in Boulder.
- Retain or strengthen the clustering of development in existing and emerging town centers.
- De-emphasize the use of higher speed car traffic and easy car parking as a measure of community quality of life.
- End the policy of promoting motor vehicle capacity increases in street design as a means of reducing air emissions.
- Design new housing to provide a compact, walkable lifestyle in town centers and transit centers.
- Facilitate households needing fewer cars by reducing travel distances to daily needs and improving access to the transit system.
- Make car parking more efficient by de-emphasizing minimum parking requirements and moving toward maximum parking caps, unbundling the price of housing from the price of parking, allowing more sharing of parking, and pricing a larger percentage of parking.
- Give priority to pedestrians, bicyclists and transit riders for the timing of signal lights, access, safety, and speed of travel, particularly in the town center.
- Incrementally shrink the excessive allocation of space (for roads, intersections, and parking areas) given over to motor vehicles, excessive motor vehicle speeds, excessive automobile subsidies, and excessive distances to daily destinations.
- Impose a moratorium on the installation of intersection double left-turn lanes and eventually remove such configurations – particularly in the more urbanized areas of Boulder.
- Increase the use of user fees for roads and parking.
- Revitalize the traffic calming program for streets with excessive, dangerous motor vehicle speeds.
- Emphasize driver attentiveness in street design rather than encouraging driver forgiveness. Similarly, emphasize life safety rather than fire safety.
- Evaluate the conversion of one-way streets back to their historic operation as two-way streets
- Reduce regional car trips by creating a better balance between the number of jobs and the number of homes.
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The mission of PLAN-Boulder County is to ensure environmental sustainability, promote far-sighted, innovative, and sustainable land use and growth patterns, preserve the area’s unique character and desirability, and reduce our carbon footprint and environmental impact.
PLAN-Boulder County envisions Boulder County as mostly rural with open land between cities and towns that support working farms on good agricultural land and provides for conservation of critical habitats for wildlife and native flora. Within Boulder and neighboring communities, urban boundaries limit sprawl and growth is directed to meet community goals of housing affordability, diversity of all kinds, environmental sustainability, neighborhood identity, and a high quality of life. PLAN-Boulder County further supports green building practices that minimize energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, PLAN-Boulder County supports a more balanced transportation system that actively promotes public transit, bicycle commuting, and pedestrian travel, and provides for smarter use of automobiles.
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the various city and county organizations with which the authors are affiliated.
Dom Nozzi, principal author of this paper, is a member of the PLAN-Boulder County Board of Directors and the City of Boulder Transportation Advisory Board. Mr. Nozzi has a BA in environmental science from SUNY Plattsburgh and a Master’s in town planning from Florida State Univ. For 20 years, he was a senior planner for Gainesville, Forida and was also a growth rate control planner for Boulder. He has authored several land development regulations for Gainesville, has given over 90 transportation speeches nationwide, and has had several transportation essays published in newspapers and magazines. His books include Road to Ruin and The Car is the Enemy of the City. He is a certified Complete Streets Instructor providing Complete Streets instruction throughout the nation.
Pat Shanks, Jeff McWhirter, Alan Boles and Scott McCarey also contributed to this paper.
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