Working Together for Complete Streets

Active transportation has emerged as a potentially strong strategy to alleviate and prevent chronic disease, including diabetes, asthma, and others associated with obesity and lack of physical activity. Public health organizations and advocates can be powerful and effective champions for multimodal transportation systems that are safe and convenient for walking, riding bicycles, and taking public transportation.

The development and implementation of Complete Streets policies ensure that routine decisions regarding the transportation network include the needs of people of all ages, abilities, income levels, and ethnicities, regardless of how they travel. Efforts to adopt and institutionalize Complete Streets have complemented other public health efforts in communities across the country, including those participating in programs sponsored Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and private health insurers.

Complete Streets offers clear path to systematically transforming systems and built environments to promote active transportation. To help attendees develop and implement their own effective Complete Streets policies, this session will describe the the basics in that path, the best practices, and the strategies necessary to implement it.

This session will also explain how public health professionals and transportation planners and engineers have collaborated on local Complete Streets initiatives. With representation from successful work in Indiana, and national perspectives, presenters will share how they have worked with transportation professionals to develop policies build support in general community and its leaders.