Summary: Six key design strategies can be crucial in determining whether a transportation project will benefit its community, according to a federal transportation study released this week by the AIA with the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies (CTS). The report, Moving Communities Forward, analyzes more than 30 different transportation projects from every corner of the country, exploring how they impact their communities' economic progress, environmental health, public safety, level of citizen participation, and overall aesthetics and livability.

"The findings show that small decisions have major effects on how a transportation project impacts its community,” says David T. Downey, Assoc. AIA, managing director of the AIA Center for Communities by Design and co-director of the study. “In particular, it was striking to see how involving the public in a design process that incorporates all applicable disciplines—architects, engineers, planners, landscape architects, contractors, and government officials—can achieve a solution that has multiple benefits for a community."

Six key design strategies
The six keys to ensuring a successful project that benefits communities economically, environmentally, and other ways are:

• Employing an integrated design process through which planners, designers, transportation officials, and builders develop a unified plan
• Including all community stakeholders from the outset
• Using three- and four-dimensional images and graphics to increase citizen involvement, understanding, and buy-in
• Creating human-scaled structures and spaces that make busy transportation hubs more manageable
• Using easily legible signs and directions that make complicated multimodal systems easier and safer to navigate
• Designing projects to be both durable and adaptable to new transportation modes and community needs.

Advocacy effort
The report is the culmination of nearly four years of advocacy work by the AIA and its members to spur policymakers to analyze how good transportation design affects communities. AIA members successfully convinced Congress to authorize the study in the 2005 transportation bill. The report has been submitted to Congress, which is gearing up for the next major highway bill debate in 2009.

According to Andrew Goldberg, Assoc. AIA, senior director of Federal Affairs and the other study co-director, these results will help shape the next highway bill. "The 2005 law expires in 2009, and key congressional committees are beginning to look at how to use the next bill to improve transportation policy,” Goldberg says. “The study's findings, particularly the importance of an integrated design process and the emphasis on sustainability, will no doubt help policymakers recognize the central role that architects play in ensuring that transportation projects create livable and sustainable communities."