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Steps to Adopting a Complete Streets Policy

About Complete Streets

Structure of a Complete Street

Effects of Complete Streets Policy

Incomplete Streets Cause Fatalities

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Complete streets

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We are amid a historic, alarming increase in the number of people struck and killed while walking, which has been on a steady rise since 2009, reaching levels not seen in more than 30 years.

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Speed is the main cause of these fatalities and the best indicator of injury or death in collisions (besides vehicle size, which is a separate topic).

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Learn tools and strategies for community wealth-building and preventing displacement at the Equitable Brownfields Redevelopment event, part of continued programming of Smart Growth America’s Equity Summit.

Equity Forum: Equitable Brownfields Redevelopment (April 5, 2022)

Our Equity Forum: Upending Cultural Displacement featured key thought leaders and practitioners who discussed the complex relationship between smart growth and cultural displacement, as well as shared innovative strategies for preserving and protecting neighborhood culture during change.

Equity Forum Recap: Protecting and preserving culture during change

Decision-makers in the public, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit sectors gathered to share replicable policies and funding strategies to advance ETOD in our region and across the country.

Equity Forum: Advancing equitable transit-oriented development

At Smart Growth America, we know that equity is at the heart of our work to create healthy, prosperous, and resilient communities. But how do we ensure that economic opportunities and the benefits of community revitalization are shared by all—including residents of rural communities and smaller cities and those who have been historically disadvantaged—especially in the face of a shifting political landscape?

Equity Summit 2025

On Tuesday, May 14 from 2 – 3 p.m., we’re partnering with the International Parking &amp; Mobility Institute to offer a free webinar exploring smart growth strategies.

Webinar: Transportation electrification and smart growth in the U.S.

We’re so thankful to have had nearly 300 people gather in Washington, DC at our first in-person Equity Summit. We spent two days unpacking how we can work together to advance equity in our transportation, housing, and land use decisions nationwide and are excited to carry all the insights that came from our speakers, panelists, and attendees into our work.

Meeting the moment: The 2024 Equity Summit

In the practical implementation of Complete Streets, not every streets has to have a bike lane—or turn lanes or bus lanes. Some great street designs like the woonerf—Dutch for “living street”— have no lanes at all! Point is, the design of the street should reflect the context it’s in.

Register for our webinar: “Implementing Context Sensitive Design”

The National Complete Streets Coalition continues our <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/tag/complete-streets-webinar-series/">webinar series</a> on implementation and equity this month with two stories of small towns doing big, innovative work to implement equitable transportation. Join us each month for a new topic related to creating safer, healthier, more equitable communities.

Register for “Small Places, Smart Mobility” webinar

The National Complete Streets Coalition continues our <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/tag/complete-streets-webinar-series/">webinar series</a> on implementation and equity this month with local officials discussing their innovative approaches to implementing Complete Streets. Join us each month for a new topic related to creating safer, healthier, more equitable streets.

Register for “Innovation in Complete Streets Infrastructure” webinar

Smart Growth America is seeking an experienced professional or team of professionals to use photography and videography to capture an upcoming event on May 21-22.

Request for proposals: Event Videography & Photography

On October 24, 2018, real estate developers, investors, and local elected officials from across New England will meet in Boston to share ideas, create new business deals, discuss smart growth issues, and prepare for the future of smart growth development across the region at the <a href="https://whova.com/portal/registration/locus_201810/">2018 LOCUS New England Leadership Summit</a>.

Registration now open for the 2018 LOCUS New England Summit

Smart Growth America (SGA) is seeking an experienced professional or team of professionals to use photography and videography to capture an upcoming event on October 17-18 in Washington, DC and produce a short narrative video afterward.

Request for proposals: Event photographer and videographer

The Brownfields Utilization, Investment and Local Development, or BUILD Act was signed into law in March 2018 and is the first major legislative change to brownfields law since passage of the original statute in 2002. Specific changes include: increased funding for cleanup, program eligibility expanded to include non-profit organizations, additional liability protections, and changes to grant programs.

Register for the BUILDing on brownfields progress webinar

The National Complete Streets Coalition is excited to continue our monthly webinar series designed to help professionals from a variety of disciplines put Complete Streets principles into action.

Register now for “Complete Streets in Canada: Designing for change”

The National Complete Streets Coalition is excited to continue our monthly webinar series designed to help professionals from a variety of disciplines put Complete Streets principles into action. <a href="https://smartgrowthamerica.org/tag/complete-streets-webinar-series/">Implementation &amp; Equity 201: The Path Forward to Complete Streets</a> is exploring a new issue each month related to creating safer, healthier, more equitable streets.

Register now for “Promoting equitable change through creative placemaking & Complete Streets”

Register now for “Public/Private Partnerships: Complete Streets & Large-Scale Development”

Many transit-oriented development projects are made possible with the help of financing from federal government programs. The details of those programs, however, are tougher to understand. What programs might your development project be eligible for? What time of year do applications open, and when are awards announced? And what do some of the most popular programs look for in applications?

Join us for a crash course on federal TOD financing programs

Rural communities face unique challenges when it comes to growth and development. At the recent Smart Growth Network meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts, experts came together to discuss how smart growth principles can be applied effectively in rural settings.

Smart growth in rural communities: Key takeaways from the latest Smart Growth Network convening

<a href="/services/grants/overview/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Community Connectors</a> is SGA’s program to help equip leaders in 15 small and mid-sized communities to repair the damage of divisive infrastructure.

How to avoid displacement and four other lessons from our 15 Community Connectors

Join us on Thursday, December 12 from 1:30-3:30 p.m. for our Equity Forum: Centering community to prevent displacement. The event will feature Sheila Somashekhar from the Purple Line Corridor Coalition, participants from SGA’s Community Connectors and Healing our Highways programs, and partners with ICF and Partnership for Southern Equity, who will present a new resource for practitioners working to prevent displacement. Join us to explore community-centered efforts to prevent displacement in the face of massive investments in community development.

Equity Forum: Centering community to prevent displacement

The 2024 Equity Summit was a huge success! We’re so thankful to have spent two days with thought leaders, advocates, and practitioners learning more about how they’re working to create more equitable transportation, housing, and land use outcomes in their communities.

Equity Summit 2024

Our staff has been working around the clock to prepare for the 2024 Equity Summit: Meeting the Moment, which is only seven days away! As we gear up for the event, we took a moment to reflect on why it matters to us and what will make this year’s Summit particularly special.

Why we’re excited about the 2024 Equity Summit

Cultural organizing as reclamation and resistance

Harnessing data and lived experiences for safe streets

Collective care for moving through this moment

Structural racism in land use, infrastructure, and lending policies have physically divided and damaged communities of color and denied generations opportunities for wealth-building.

Building momentum: Lessons from frontline advocates & government leaders

Moving within this moment: Strategies for overcoming structural barriers

The Equity Summit is more than a conference. It’s a time to connect movement leaders, identify key needs within the field, and build a community of mutual support and encouragement among practitioners who may be discouraged by resistance to meaningful progress. Here’s what you can expect.

What to expect at the 2024 Equity Summit

At our first Power Hour, we spoke with two implementers and one advocate from Minnesota about how they’ve gone about establishing a north star for Complete Streets in the North Star State. As it turns out, it’s all about the process.

Vision is a verb: Looking back at our first Complete Streets Power Hour

Last month, Smart Growth America hosted our third annual Equity Summit. The three days of virtual programming held space for thought leaders and practitioners in the planning space to gather and ensure that racial equity is a key priority in any smart growth approach.

Staff takeaways from the 2023 Equity Summit

The Equity Summit is a virtual gathering of thought leaders and practitioners who come together to discuss insights and strategies to ensure that racial equity is a key priority in any smart growth approach. The Equity Summit took place virtually, February 7-9, 2023.

Equity Summit 2023

Smart Growth Means Accessibility: SGA Attends Disability Economic Justice Collaborative Anniversary Celebration

The Equity Forum: Upending Cultural Displacement held on July 13th also included the first-of-its-kind live technical assistance workshops with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the community of Royal, Florida, who were selected to receive expert advice from our panelists and selected SGA staff members.

Equity Forum Recap: Technical Assistance Workshops

Smart Growth America’s Equity Forum: Upending Cultural Displacement is a continuation of our year-round equity programming—anchored by the Equity Summit programming focused on advancing racial equity through smart growth. Our speakers will share their unique stories and key strategies to assist advocates, planners, developers, and elected officials in better understanding and mitigating the various forms of cultural displacement affecting communities across the country.

Smart Growth America’s Equity Forum: Upending Cultural Displacement

A program of Smart Growth America (SGA), the <a href="/programs-and-coalitions/nuclear-communities/economic-diversification-roadmap/">Nuclear Communities team</a> supports nuclear host communities through building capacity and developing resiliency plans, gathering a wealth of information and perspectives along the way. While each host community has its own unique set of circumstances, they all have one thing in common: preparation is needed to be resilient in the face of closures. This blog post is part of a series documenting the Nuclear Communities Technical Assistance team’s lessons learned throughout the project and highlights many of the issues that will be addressed in the Nuclear Communities Forum.

Conversations on economic adjustment and resilience in the context of nuclear decommissioning

Based on the keynote presentations and panelist conversations of each day, these <a href="/events/equity-summit-3/2022/?type=resources">guides</a> are designed to facilitate dialogue between you and your colleagues, you and your community, or with yourself about what you heard (or missed!) at the Summit.

Equity Summit 2022

Smart Growth America’s newest board member brings expertise in resilience and adaptation planning to the smart growth movement. Join us next week for a 30-minute chat between Camille Manning-Broome and SGA President and CEO Calvin Gladney over coffee (or lunch) next week on 12/15.

Dec. 15: Chat with SGA’s newest board member

This fall, we invite you to join <a href="https://sga-vpb-frontend.vercel.app/">Smart Growth America</a>, <a href="/programs-and-coalitions/locus/">LOCUS: Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors</a>, and over a dozen smart growth experts from across the country for Commonwealth Communities: Smart Growth Strategies for our Emergent Future

Dec. 15: Commonwealth Communities

At Smart Growth America, we deeply believe that improving racial disparities is at the core of a smart growth approach. But what does that mean? How does it work in practice? And how can smart growth advocates do it better?

Equity Summit 2021

The wait is almost over! Smart Growth America’s National Complete Streets Coalition, in partnership with the Urban Land Institute, invite you to our second national conference. Join us for Intersections: Creating Culturally Complete Streets.

Join us in Nashville for Intersections: Creating Culturally Complete Streets

Why can only speed or safety be prioritized first?

Divided by Design 2023 Webinar

Equity Summit 2024 (Test)

Dangerous by Design Champion Testimonies

Community Connectors Atlanta Convening Recap

Small Towns, Big Impact

ATL Rising: Building resilience in the face of extreme heat

The 2024 Equity Summit Recap Video

A rural roadmap: Complete Streets for small towns

A rural roadmap: Aging in place with Complete Streets

A Community of Collaboration – The 2024 Champions Alumni Convening

Walking in Memphis: These streets are Dangerous by Design

Equity Summit 2024: Charles T. Brown

Equity Summit 2024 Keynote: April De Simone

NEW VIDEO: Creating Thriving Communities Through Complete Streets: Wenatchee’s Story

VIDEO: Pedestrian fatalities continue to rise. Here’s why.

VIDEO: How an obscure federal measure justifies the hefty price tag of destructive, divisive roadway projects

WATCH: Safety and vehicle speed are fundamentally opposed

VIDEO: “Not just a way to get from A to B”

VIDEO: “I think no matter what part of town you live in, you deserve a street that is safe”

VIDEO: Complete Streets in Pittsburgh are vital for improving public health

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Here's a brief real world example of a specific intervention to help make an unsafe, wide street a little bit safer, and help it better serve the needs of everyone who needs to use it:

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Read the Full Article

Our newest edition of Dangerous by Design has “design” in its name, but what do we mean when we say that street design is a large factor responsible for this epidemic of deaths?

Roadway design significantly influences driver behavior, often more than speed limits. Streets prioritize car flow over safety, contributing to these issues.

Impact Stories

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Complete Streets

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Even the best-planned cities have a few hidden alleys.

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From reduced opportunities to travel by bike or foot to a lack of parks and green spaces, our built environment actively contributes to the state of our physical and mental well-being, and nowhere is its negative impact felt more than in Black and Brown communities.
<figure id="attachment_86102" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-86102" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-86102 size-large" src="/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/taylor-flowe-suburban-housing-unsplash-1024x656.jpg" alt="A row of identical houses in a suburban neighborhood" width="1024" height="656" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-86102" class="wp-caption-text"><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/white-wooden-house-4zRkgmuZH-8">(Taylor Flowe, Unsplash)</a></figcaption></figure>
It has been well documented that Black and Latinx households face higher risks of developing physical ailments <a href="https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/connection-between-housing-health-and-racial-equity">including asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, and experiencing a heart attack or stroke compared to white households</a>. These physical health outcomes are compounded by the mental health disparities seen in Black and Brown communities. Residents are experiencing <a href="https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/148477">higher rates of social isolation</a> (a key factor contributing to the <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf">national loneliness epidemic</a>.) This increases the risk of experiencing dementia, heart disease, premature death, depression and/or anxiety.
Much of the blame for poor health outcomes in communities of color lies with our built environment and the policies that shape it, including zoning regulations.
Since the 1920s, zoning has not only been used as a tool to separate land uses, but also a means to <a href="https://sga-vpb-frontend.vercel.app/zoning-for-equity-raising-all-boats/">socially separate people along the lines of wealth, class, and race</a>. This can be seen through the racist practice of redlining, where the government published maps that designated neighborhoods based on their “residential security” into categories of “best” (green) to “hazardous”(red). Areas marked in red were generally places with higher populations of people of color. This land designation was an intentional tool used to spur widespread disinvestment in Black and Brown communities, further destabilizing neighborhoods and depriving residents of necessary <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/redlining">resources such as grocery stores and supermarkets</a>. Residents of redlined neighborhoods were additionally denied access to financial services including mortgages and insurance loans, causing disparities in homeownership rates, locking in patterns of residential segregation, and contributing to the racial wealth gap.
Despite efforts to disallow the inequitable practices of the past, zoning has largely continued to reinforce this reality, and it shows in the data: <a href="https://time.com/6074243/segregation-america-increasing/">American neighborhoods are more residentially segregated today than ever before</a>. In this way, zoning has not only created barriers to developing social connections but also has restricted our opportunities to build relationships with people who differ from ourselves. These relationships have strong ripple effects in communities, helping to <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235746349_Social_participation_and_social_trust_in_adolescence_The_importance_of_heterogeneous_encounters">build social trust</a> and strengthen mental health outcomes by reducing loneliness and increasing an individual’s socialness and sense of empathy—all factors that lead to healthier, more socially connected communities.
Today, the most common form of zoning in the U.S., often referred to as Euclidean zoning, tends to separate uses, leading to areas where only low-density single-family housing can be built. People who live in communities that are designed this way often have to travel long distances and take solo trips by car to get to work or go to the store. As a result, they have fewer opportunities for informal social interactions that can lead to deeper relationships, as well as fewer chances to organically engage in physical activity like walking or biking to school or work.
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<h4>Public realm disparities</h4>
Residents of majority-Black and Brown neighborhoods often have a deficit of people-centered infrastructure including <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/15/the-inequality-of-sidewalks/">sidewalks</a> and safe crosswalks, as well as <a href="https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2020/09/23/racial-disparity-in-access-to-public-green-space/">substantially less access to green spaces</a>. Black people are <a href="https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/connection-between-housing-health-and-racial-equity">52 percent more likely</a> to live in a census block group with heat-risk conditions compared to white people. Heat risk can include having little to no green space, and a high volume of impervious surfaces like asphalt and concrete pavements. These conditions create a higher risk for heat-related deaths and illnesses.[/alert]
These combined factors have created spaces that discourage physical activity, increase surface temperatures (leading to more extreme heat events), and expose residents to toxic air pollution levels <a href="https://itdp.org/2021/03/10/highways-and-zoning-tools-of-racist-policy/">(which has been linked with developing asthma, cognitive development delays, and premature death)</a>. And though everyone experiences these health impacts on some level, the people who are most at risk are people of color.
<h3>What can be done?</h3>
Zoning got us into this crisis, and it can get us out. Zoning is a tool that yields different built environment results depending on how it is leveraged. Enacting zoning reforms that prioritize more equitable, people-centered, smart growth development can help to reverse the inequitable trend in our built environment. For example, zoning regulations that <a href="https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/three-ways-zoning-can-advance-housing-and-climate-justice">prioritize affordable housing production</a> can improve access to housing, and studies show that having safe, affordable housing <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/briefs/housing-and-health-overview-literature">helps to promote better health outcomes</a>. Additionally, zoning that prioritizes green spaces like parks can encourage an active lifestyle, reduce risk of heat-related deaths and illnesses, and even reduce stress, anxiety, and depression for community residents.
Land use regulations have encouraged a built environment that fails to serve everyone’s needs for far too long. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By making changes to outdated, harmful zoning regulations, community leaders can help ensure that all residents can experience stronger health outcomes, particularly for residents that are most vulnerable.
Looking to learn more about zoning reform? Check out <a href="https://knowledge.uli.org/en/Reports/Research%20Reports/2023/Reshaping%20the%20City%20Zoning%20for%20a%20More%20Equitable%20Resilient%20and%20Sustainable%20Future">our Reshaping the City report</a> (co-authored with the Urban Land Institute) and take a look at <a href="https://sga-vpb-frontend.vercel.app/how-form-based-codes-can-help-reshape-a-city/">how form-based codes (an alternative land use regulation) can shape a city’s built environment</a>.

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