Safer Cities Together Charrette: Waze Concepts for safety focused tools and features inspired by NACTO cities

Join members of Waze's Partnerships and Product teams to ideate about making roads safer for every traveler. We will craft user stories and review concepts inspired by conversations with NACTO cities as from Cambridge to Miami to El Paso to

Workshop: Normalizing & Operationalizing Racial Equity within NACTO Cities

Training

This interactive workshop will provide an introduction to the roles, challenges, responsibilities and opportunities for NACTO City leaders to advance racial equity within their agency and/or organization. This workshop is geared towards city leaders who have a foundation of understanding

Workshop: Don’t Give Up At the Intersection - Signals & Sticky Spots Edition

Training

Don’t think you have room for a protected intersection? Not sure how to give bikes priority over turning cars? This practical training combines the power of time (signals) and space (geometric solutions) for tricky bikeway intersections. Learn how

Workshop: Move! That! Bus! Designing Streets for Transit

Training

Redesigning city streets to get the bus out of slow traffic is one of the most effective ways to improve reliability, increase ridership, and fight climate change. By painting bus lanes, retiming signals, and fixing pain points at

Workshop: Redesigning Major Streets For Safety

Training

Picture your city’s biggest, widest, most risky arterial. It probably has lots of lanes, lots of cars, frequent crashes and injuries, and traffic swinging from stop-and-go to fast-and-furious. How can we fix it? Join this workshop for

Workshop: Crash Course in Public Speaking

Training

Communication matters. As transportation practitioners, it’s natural for us to use technical jargon and too many acronyms in our daily communication. But, it’s important and necessary to connect with the public, meet your audience where they are, and

Workshop: Projects To Programs

Training

One high-quality bike or bus lane is great, but, on its own, one project is rarely enough to significantly change how people get around. As traffic fatalities continue to increase and the planet continues to warm, cities are

Workshop: Meetings That Matter: Building Facilitation Skills

Training

Meetings and all sorts of people-convenings are critical to getting our work done well, but far too often, they feel like a poor use of valuable time, with unclear goals, the wrong people in the room, unengaged participants,

Registration

Now in its tenth year, the NACTO Designing Cities Conference brings together nearly 1,000 officials, planners, and practitioners to advance the state of transportation in cities.  This will be our first in-person gathering since 2019 in Toronto! We are grateful to

Opening Plenary

Plenary

Join our opening plenary to hear Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui of Cambridge, and Mayor Katjana Ballantyne of Somerville as they discuss recent bold and creative transportation interventions, as well as their advocacy for investing in state-of-repair

Designing Digital Infrastructure to meet Policy Goals

Breakout Session

Transportation is going through a digital transformation, and the future will be no less analogue than it is today. With that, cities need to understand the direction of digital infrastructure, data standardization, and how digitization can support policy outcomes. In

From Parking to Placemaking: How Cities Transformed Streets During the Pandemic

Breakout Session

As the pandemic shuttered businesses and schools across North America in March 2020, city transportation agencies were on the front lines. With most indoor gathering spaces shuttered for safety, city transportation agencies leapt into action to transform their vast networks

So Your Project was Derailed. Now What?

Breakout Session

We often have lofty, yet reasonable goals and plans for street transformation at the outset of a project—but new information or feedback can send the project down a different path. Join us for a discussion with agency leaders who have

Intersection Planning for Slower and Bikable Streets

Breakout Session

Getting people biking, rolling, and walking across busy streets can be the hardest part of building a neighborhood bikeway. In this session, cities will share innovative project development and design strategies and collaboratively discuss design solutions to a challenging intersection.

Better Vehicles for Safer Streets

Breakout Session

Increasing vehicle size and weight and poor visibility from the drivers’ seat are exacerbating the traffic fatality crisis on U.S. streets. But, while vehicle design itself is regulated federally, cities still have tools at their disposal to help ensure that

The Rise of The Bus Lane: Highlights From Across North America

Breakout Session

Cities across North America are proving that dedicated bus lanes are one of the most time and cost-effective measures to improve transit speed and reliability and win back riders. With record bus lane expansion during over the past three years,

Designing for Non-Visual Navigation

Breakout Session

Let’s face facts: streets built for cars are streets built for the sighted. The need for a broader vocabulary of street design for blind and low-vision pedestrians has never been greater, as critical safety infrastructure - such as painted curb

Counting Small Things with Wheels

Breakout Session

In urban planning, what we count—and how we count it—matters. The choices cities make about when, where, and how to measure trips can make or break a bike network. Building on NACTO's 2022 Making Bikes Count practitioner's paper, this

Neighborly Collaboration in the Boston Metro: Local Leaders on Sharing Streets

Breakout Session

With most transportation projects, your jurisdiction’s decisions impact not only your own community members but your neighbors as well. In the Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville metro region, the geography of local boundaries makes neighborly collaboration a critical part of transportation

Opening Reception at the House of Blues

NACTO Events

Join us for refreshments at the House of Blues Boston from 6:00pm-8:00pm. The House of Blues Boston is a historic music venue across the street from Fenway Park. House of Blues started in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard Square. Located

Plenary Session

Plenary

Join us September 7 – 10, 2022 in Boston-Cambridge-Somerville for NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, convening transportation leaders and practitioners from across North America and the world to discuss key trends in urban street design and transportation policy.   Check out

Walkshop: Boston’s Autonomous Vehicle Leader - Motional

Walkshop

Motional is a global leader in driverless technology, developing Level 4 autonomous vehicles for ride-hail and delivery applications. Formed in 2020 as a joint venture between automotive technology expert Aptiv and Hyundai Motor Group, Motional is uniquely positioned to fundamentally change the way

Walkshop: View from the Driver's Seat (Hosted by USDOT Volpe Center)

Walkshop

Join the USDOT Volpe Center to learn about the safety impacts of large vehicles, featuring higher and lower vision city trucks! A driver's reaction time is 50% faster when they can see a pedestrian, bicyclist or other road user with

Walkshop: Making Tremont Street Safer: A Journey through Space and Time

Walkshop

Big changes are underway to make Tremont Street better for people of all ages and abilities. Join Boston Transportation Department staff on a tour of this vibrant corridor in Boston’s walkable South End, a neighborhood that encompasses the city’s rich

Walkshop: The Real Bike Rooms of Boston

Walkshop

It’s been over ten years since Boston established minimum guidelines for bicycle parking in new developments. But all bike rooms are not created equal. In 2019, we revisited our guidelines–comparing ourselves to peer cities, surveying users, visiting bike rooms, and

Walkshop: A Journey to the Center of the Street: Center-Running Bus Lanes on Columbus Avenue

Walkshop

Side-running bus lanes are great, but moving bus lanes to the center of the street removes conflicts and helps bus service reach its full potential. On this walkshop, we'll visit the Columbus Avenue project, a collaboration between the City of Boston

Walkshop: Fare Free Buses: Policy in Action

Walkshop

What is a fair fare? Learn about the many ways the City of Boston is working to tackle this issue. We'll start by taking a fare-free bus from Ruggles Station, where we'll get to see all-door boarding in action, to Nubian

Walkshop: Bike, Scoot or Walk Boston's Best

Walkshop

Explore the latest, greatest and safest bicycle infrastructure in Boston. We'll start with the Harvard Bridge, where advocates partnered with the state DOT to use traffic cones to install a 4-to-2 road diet for the busiest bicycle route in the state.

Walkshop: Western Avenue, River Street and the Carl Barron Plaza

Walkshop

Join us for a tour of Western Avenue, which received the “Best Bicycle Lane of the Year” award from PeopleForBikes in 2015. We’ll talk about community engagement processes, and how neighbors and city officials were brought on board to support

Walkshop: Vision Zero Corridor Tour: College Avenue and Powder House Circle

Walkshop

How can a functioning road diet be applied to a high-volume traffic circle? Join City project managers on a tour of Somerville’s College Avenue corridor, which is only 40’ wide but handles 200+ bus trips per day. We’ll examine aggressive

Walkshop: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in East Somerville

Walkshop

The legacy of America’s highway-building era weighs heavily on the East Somerville community, which features dense, mixed-income neighborhoods burdened by particulate pollution, unhealthy noise levels and disproportionate frequency and severity of traffic crashes. On this tour, we'll speak with local

Walkshop: Union Square: Organizing Public and Private Investment

Walkshop

Join us for a tour of Union Square, Somerville’s historic and future downtown, as well as a key center of civic life, international culture and the arts economy. In order to make the case for the MBTA Green Line light rail

Walkshop: New Neighborhoods: Somerville’s Assembly Square

Walkshop

Connecting new development districts to the existing urban and social fabric can be challenging. On this tour, we'll wander the streets and public spaces of Somerville’s Assembly Square neighborhood, a 100-acre planned development district on the banks of the Mystic

Walkshop: Upping the Ante: Quick-Build BRT Solutions for Broadway in Winter Hill

Walkshop

Mega-projects alone can’t solve the urgent mobility challenges facing our communities. While MBTA Green Line light rail construction was underway in Somerville in 2019, the City simultaneously installed a ½-mile long, bi-directional, all-day bus lane on a major transit corridor

Walkshop: Rail with Trail: The Somerville Community Path Extension

Walkshop

Experience the brand-new Somerville Community Path Extension, a dramatic two-mile shared-use path running alongside an active rail corridor through the heart of New England’s densest municipality. Learn how grassroots and official advocacy created a viable funding strategy for the Path

Walkshop: Reimagining Shared Space in Cambridge’s Cultural District

Walkshop

Take a walk through Central Square, Cambridge’s only Cultural District and Business Improvement District. Central Square is a neighborhood in flux, known locally as a cultural destination and bookended by world-class institutions of higher learning. It’s a crossroads of the

Walkshop: Urban Transit and Bike Streets in Cambridge

Walkshop

Massachusetts Avenue is the transportation “spine” of the Boston region. In recent years, Cambridge has redesigned two sections of “Mass Ave” to prioritize sustainable transportation. Our WalkShop will take us through these two sections, which have markedly different characteristics. South Mass

Walkshop: Boston City Hall and the Plaza, Then and Now

Walkshop

Take a tour of the iconic Boston City Hall, a brutalist building that opened to the public in 1969. Learn about its history, recent evolution, and future conservation, while also visiting the newly completed first phase renovation of City Hall

Walkshop: Managing Growth and Density in Kendall Square

Walkshop

Kendall Square has been called the densest square mile of innovation on the planet. Its information technology, social media, genomic research and biomedical research companies attract thousands of employees and visitors. Many of these organizations have relationships with MIT and

Walkshop: Two Communities, Two Bridges, Connected by Bikes

Walkshop

Boston and Cambridge have been peering at each other over the Charles River for three hundred years. First, horse carriages and later trains plied over the bridges connecting the two cities. Now, the bridges are evolving again, as the cities

Walkshop: Retrofitting Streets in Historic Highland Park

Walkshop

Join a walking tour of the Highland Park neighborhood of Roxbury. We’ll talk about the area's history and examine new traffic-calming changes built as part of the City’s Neighborhood Slow Streets program. Highlights will include Eliot Square, home to the

Walkshop: South Boston Seaport District

Walkshop

Tour the South Boston Seaport District and discover Boston’s newest neighborhood. Since the Big Dig project, the South Boston Seaport District has evolved from an industrial waterfront to a dense redevelopment of commercial and residential uses, including the Boston Convention

Walkshop: Bikes and Boats and Planes, Oh My! A Journey Down the East Boston Greenway

Walkshop

East Boston is in the midst of rapid transformation, as shipyards and vacant factory sites give way to luxury condos and revitalized greenspaces. Across the harbor from downtown, the neighborhood faces impacts from climate change and is uniquely disconnected from

Walkshop: Exploring Chinatown

Walkshop

Join this walking tour with community transportation and climate action leaders, as well as City of Boston Environment Department staff, to discuss the intersection of climate and transportation planning in Chinatown. We'll also explore how economic revitalization efforts related to the

Walkshop: Love That Dirty Water: Boston’s Harborwalk

Walkshop

As Boston cleaned up its polluted harbor in the 1980's, a team of civic rock stars leveraged colonial laws to create requirements for public paths along the waterfront. The result was Boston’s Harborwalk, a near-continuous, 43-mile linear park along the

Walkshop: The Emerald Necklace

Walkshop

The Emerald Necklace is a seven-mile linear park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect, journalist, abolitionist and sanitary commissioner whose writings helped inspire the creation of the National Park System. In this tour, we’ll take a

Walkshop: People Before Highways: Southwest Corridor

Walkshop

Learn about the rich history of Boston's transportation and housing activism. We’ll tour the precedent-setting Orange line corridor, and hear from one of the nation's top scholars of the “people before highways” movement, Dr. Karilyn Crockett. We’ll discuss the history

Walkshop: The Big Dig and the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Plus an Island and a Bridge)

Walkshop

Learn how Boston buried an interstate highway and built a world-class park over it. On this tour, we’ll walk along the Greenway, stopping at key sections of the project to do a deep dive on how the streets and sidewalks

Walkshop: A Biking Tour of Commonwealth Avenue

Walkshop

Explore parts of Commonwealth Avenue (or “Comm Ave,” as the locals call it), a city street traveled by 100,000+ people each day by foot, bicycle, trolley, bus, and motor vehicle. The group will traverse a suite of bike facility designs

Walkshop: A Downtown for People: Repurposing Streets for Plazas and Pedestrian Spaces

Walkshop

New shared streets and plazas are popping up across Boston’s reinvigorated downtown pedestrian zone. Join us for a tour of tactical plazas using paint, planters, moveable seating and other creative elements, and check out others that have jumped from tactical

Lunch & Meet the Cities, Fellows, and Sponsors

Breakout Session

Take a break for lunch, and then start meeting the cities, sponsors, and Transportation Justice Fellows showcasing their work this year.

Structured for Success

Breakout Session

In a recent survey of NACTO member cities, more than a quarter of respondents felt their organization’s structure was unhelpful for achieving their city’s desired transportation outcomes. Across North America, city agencies’ goals have changed dramatically in the last 20

The Boston Region’s Bus Network Redesign Story

Breakout Session

Today’s bus networks are largely running on outdated routes planned decades ago, and in the case of the Boston region---over a century ago. Now, the MBTA is embarking on a major bus network redesign (BNRD) to bring its transportation system

From Projects to Programs

Breakout Session

Cities are looking to streamline - going from building one-off bike lanes to developing bike programs that deliver excellent projects, year after year. Looking at all parts of the project life cycle--planning, engagement, design, procurement, and implementation--this workshop will revisit

Testing Grounds: Lessons from the Front Lines of AV Testing

Breakout Session

With the number of AVs operating on public streets growing year-to-year, cities have more firsthand experience with this technology than ever. As the AV industry scales up deployment, cities on the front lines are confronting new questions of how to

All Hands on Deck: Recovering from Sudden Disasters

Breakout Session

Aging infrastructure and climate change are contributing to record-breaking numbers of disasters that are straining ‘traditional’ responses from states and the federal government. In this session, learn how agencies are building the muscle, the relationships, and the plans to respond

U, Me, & USDOT

Breakout Session

Today's USDOT is staffed with former municipal leaders in multiple high-level positions, and is perhaps better equipped than ever to partner with cities in pursuit of better safety, equity, and sustainability outcomes. Join this session to hear from USDOT officials with

What Comes Next in the Future of Vision Zero

Breakout Session

Nearly 10 years since the first U.S. cities adopted Vision Zero policies, traffic fatalities are at an all-time high. This isn’t for lack of trying: more than 45 cities have adopted Vision Zero policies and have made significant progress in

Beyond Paint and Posts: Protecting Bikeways Better

Breakout Session

When it comes to building paint-and-post projects, not all materials and designs are created equal. Keeping cars and trucks out of bike lanes takes careful improvements to bike infrastructure, with materials working to keep different modes safely separated. In this panel,

Coffee Break & Meet the Cities, Sponsors, and Fellows

Breakout Session

Coffee/networking break with the opportunity to continue to meet the cities, sponsors, and Transportation Justice Fellows.

The New Curb Management

Breakout Session

Urban curb space has long been a scarce resource. Governed by complex rules communicated by signage and physical infrastructure, curb management tools have not always kept pace with changing demand driven by new mobility and on-demand services; alternative uses of

Re-Framing Your Internal Power Structure to Influence Equity Outcomes

Breakout Session

When transportation is reliable, frequent, accessible, and affordable, it has the power to increase economic opportunity for the communities that need it most. But many of our transportation systems leave marginalized communities with few options for mobility, and fail to

Wait, We Can Tweet That?!?

Breakout Session

Communications is best when it’s proactive, not reactive. In this session, learn from the people who have shaped distinctive voices for their cities, agencies, and our field, and the ways that authentic human connection can be facilitated en masse on

From Arterials to Urban Streets: Innovations in Major Street Design

Breakout Session

Cities are transforming bigger and bigger streets into safer, human-scale places. Get inspired by great projects from around the continent in this fast-paced show-and-tell talk, then break up into smaller groups for Q&A directly with each speaker.

Run! That! Bus! Strategies for Investing in More Frequent Bus Service

Breakout Session

Frequency is freedom. It’s what attracts more people to ride transit and leads existing riders to take transit more often. Yet only 10% of Americans are within walking distance to transit service that runs every 15 minutes or better. Investing

Universal Basic Mobility: Making Sustainable Transit Options Accessible

Breakout Session

Universal basic mobility is the idea that residents have access to a range of affordable, reliable transportation options. Period. Join us to discuss the ways cities are beginning to pilot a variety of approaches to tackle tangible ways of increasing

Small Vehicles, Big Impact: Regulating Shared Micromobility

Breakout Session

It's been five years since the first dockless bike and scooter-share programs first appeared on the streets of North American cities. In that time, cities have built frameworks to manage these systems from the ground up. As the shared micromobility industry

The Last Mile: distribution hubs and cargo-bike delivery

Breakout Session

In the U.S., 80% of all freight begins or ends in cities. Managing how those goods move, especially in the last mile, is essential to safe, sustainable cities. But, effective urban freight delivery requires public/private sector coordination and innovation. In this

Building & Upgrading Bikeways at Scale

Breakout Session

Scaling up bikeway projects hinges on a single factor: agency capacity. Years of building bike networks across the country has revealed best practices for capacity building that apply from city to city, despite differences in contexts and resources. In this session,

Happy Hour & Meet the Cities, Fellows, and Sponsors

Breakout Session

Meet the host cities, the sponsors that make this event possible, and the Transportation Justice Fellows doing the heavy work of promoting equity in the transportation field.

Plenary Session

Plenary

Join us September 7 – 10, 2022 in Boston-Cambridge-Somerville for NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, convening transportation leaders and practitioners from across North America and the world to discuss key trends in urban street design and transportation policy.   Check out

Walkshop: New Neighborhoods, New Connections

Walkshop

North Point/Cambridge Crossing, a former industrial site, is now one of Cambridge's major mixed-use districts. The City holistically guided the area’s growth as a planned development area, and providing expanded public transportation and active transportation facilities was central to its

Walkshop: Making Tremont Street Safer: A Journey through Space and Time

Walkshop

Big changes are underway to make Tremont Street better for people of all ages and abilities. Join Boston Transportation Department staff on a tour of this vibrant corridor in Boston’s walkable South End, a neighborhood that encompasses the city’s rich

Walkshop: The Real Bike Rooms of Boston

Walkshop

It’s been over ten years since Boston established minimum guidelines for bicycle parking in new developments. But all bike rooms are not created equal. In 2019, we revisited our guidelines–comparing ourselves to peer cities, surveying users, visiting bike rooms, and

Walkshop: A Journey to the Center of the Street: Center-Running Bus Lanes on Columbus Avenue

Walkshop

Side-running bus lanes are great, but moving bus lanes to the center of the street removes conflicts and helps bus service reach its full potential. On this walkshop, we’ll visit the Columbus Avenue project, a collaboration between the City of Boston

Walkshop: Bike, Scoot or Walk Boston’s Best

Walkshop

Explore the latest, greatest and safest bicycle infrastructure in Boston. We’ll start with the Harvard Bridge, where advocates partnered with the state DOT to use traffic cones to install a 4-to-2 road diet for the busiest bicycle route in the state.

Walkshop: Western Avenue, River Street and the Carl Barron Plaza

Walkshop

Join us for a tour of Western Avenue, which received the “Best Bicycle Lane of the Year” award from PeopleForBikes in 2015. We’ll talk about community engagement processes, and how neighbors and city officials were brought on board to support

Walkshop: Vision Zero Corridor Tour: College Avenue and Powder House Circle

Walkshop

How can a functioning road diet be applied to a high-volume traffic circle? Join City project managers on a tour of Somerville’s College Avenue corridor, which is only 40’ wide but handles 200+ bus trips per day. We’ll examine aggressive

Walkshop: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in East Somerville

Walkshop

The legacy of America’s highway-building era weighs heavily on the East Somerville community, which features dense, mixed-income neighborhoods burdened by particulate pollution, unhealthy noise levels and disproportionate frequency and severity of traffic crashes. On this tour, we’ll speak with local

Walkshop: Union Square: Organizing Public and Private Investment

Walkshop

Join us for a tour of Union Square, Somerville’s historic and future downtown, as well as a key center of civic life, international culture and the arts economy. In order to make the case for the MBTA Green Line light rail

Walkshop: New Neighborhoods: Somerville’s Assembly Square

Walkshop

Connecting new development districts to the existing urban and social fabric can be challenging. On this tour, we’ll wander the streets and public spaces of Somerville’s Assembly Square neighborhood, a 100-acre planned development district on the banks of the Mystic

Walkshop: Upping the Ante: Quick-Build BRT Solutions for Broadway in Winter Hill

Walkshop

Mega-projects alone can’t solve the urgent mobility challenges facing our communities. While MBTA Green Line light rail construction was underway in Somerville in 2019, the City simultaneously installed a ½-mile long, bi-directional, all-day bus lane on a major transit corridor

Walkshop: Rail with Trail: The Somerville Community Path Extension

Walkshop

Experience the brand-new Somerville Community Path Extension, a dramatic two-mile shared-use path running alongside an active rail corridor through the heart of New England’s densest municipality. Learn how grassroots and official advocacy created a viable funding strategy for the Path

Walkshop: Reimagining Shared Space in Cambridge’s Cultural District

Walkshop

Take a walk through Central Square, Cambridge’s only Cultural District and Business Improvement District. Central Square is a neighborhood in flux, known locally as a cultural destination and bookended by world-class institutions of higher learning. It’s a crossroads of the

Walkshop: Urban Transit and Bike Streets in Cambridge

Walkshop

Massachusetts Avenue is the transportation “spine” of the Boston region. In recent years, Cambridge has redesigned two sections of “Mass Ave” to prioritize sustainable transportation. Our WalkShop will take us through these two sections, which have markedly different characteristics. South Mass

Walkshop: Managing Growth and Density in Kendall Square

Walkshop

Kendall Square has been called the densest square mile of innovation on the planet. Its information technology, social media, genomic research and biomedical research companies attract thousands of employees and visitors. Many of these organizations have relationships with MIT and

Walkshop: Two Communities, Two Bridges, Connected by Bikes

Walkshop

Boston and Cambridge have been peering at each other over the Charles River for three hundred years. First, horse carriages and later trains plied over the bridges connecting the two cities. Now, the bridges are evolving again, as the cities

Walkshop: Pathways in New Mobility

Walkshop

What is a green job? Who gets them? Come with us on a journey to look at three programs working with the City of Boston that bring these questions to life. Take the Orange Line to Roxbury Crossing and visit

Walkshop: South Boston Seaport District

Walkshop

Tour the South Boston Seaport District and discover Boston’s newest neighborhood. Since the Big Dig project, the South Boston Seaport District has evolved from an industrial waterfront to a dense redevelopment of commercial and residential uses, including the Boston Convention

Walkshop: Bikes and Boats and Planes, Oh My! A Journey Down the East Boston Greenway

Walkshop

East Boston is in the midst of rapid transformation, as shipyards and vacant factory sites give way to luxury condos and revitalized greenspaces. Across the harbor from downtown, the neighborhood faces impacts from climate change and is uniquely disconnected from

Walkshop: Exploring Chinatown

Walkshop

Join this walking tour with community transportation and climate action leaders, as well as City of Boston Environment Department staff, to discuss the intersection of climate and transportation planning in Chinatown. We'll also explore how economic revitalization efforts related to

Walkshop: Love That Dirty Water: Boston’s Harborwalk

Walkshop

As Boston cleaned up its polluted harbor in the 1980's, a team of civic rock stars leveraged colonial laws to create requirements for public paths along the waterfront. The result was Boston’s Harborwalk, a near-continuous, 43-mile linear park along the

Walkshop: The Emerald Necklace

Walkshop

The Emerald Necklace is a seven-mile linear park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect, journalist, abolitionist and sanitary commissioner whose writings helped inspire the creation of the National Park System. In this tour, we’ll take a

Walkshop: People Before Highways: Southwest Corridor

Walkshop

Learn about the rich history of Boston's transportation and housing activism. We’ll tour the precedent-setting Orange line corridor, and hear from one of the nation's top scholars of the “people before highways” movement, Dr. Karilyn Crockett. We’ll discuss the history

Walkshop: The Big Dig and the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Plus an Island and a Bridge)

Walkshop

Learn how Boston buried an interstate highway and built a world-class park over it. On this tour, we’ll walk along the Greenway, stopping at key sections of the project to do a deep dive on how the streets and sidewalks were

Walkshop: A Biking Tour of Commonwealth Avenue

Walkshop

Explore parts of Commonwealth Avenue (or “Comm Ave,” as the locals call it), a city street traveled by 100,000+ people each day by foot, bicycle, trolley, bus, and motor vehicle. The group will traverse a suite of bike facility designs

Walkshop: A Downtown Biking Tour

Walkshop

Gain firsthand knowledge of Boston's network of protected bike lanes, both existing and planned, by riding them with us. Pedal through historic neighborhoods, areas changed by urban renewal, and see the oldest remaining street network in the county. Staff from

Walkshop: A Downtown for People: Repurposing Streets for Plazas and Pedestrian Spaces

Walkshop

New shared streets and plazas are popping up across Boston’s reinvigorated downtown pedestrian zone. Join us for a tour of tactical plazas using paint, planters, moveable seating and other creative elements, and check out others that have jumped from tactical

Closing Plenary

Plenary

Join us September 7 – 10, 2022 in Boston-Cambridge-Somerville for NACTO’s Designing Cities conference, convening transportation leaders and practitioners from across North America and the world to discuss key trends in urban street design and transportation policy.   Check out

Bridging the Gap: the Last Mile

Breakout Session

The role of public transportation has continued to evolve from simply putting buses on the road into one of being mobility conveners across bus, rail, scooters, bikes, shuttles, and more. No one entity can do it - and do it

Grappling with the Grey: Nuanced Challenges and Benefits of Speed Safety Cameras

Breakout Session

In a safer system, we could have prevented the 16,200 deaths and countless serious injuries that took place on city streets in 2020. Traffic fatalities and serious injuries are on the rise in the US, and cities are turning up

Transformation and Change: Charting a More Equitable Future for City DOTs

Breakout Session

Change is hard. In the past few years, the entire transportation field has grappled with many complex changes, ranging from a global pandemic and worsening climate crisis to technological innovations and an ever-shifting political climate. Five years ago, Oakland stood

How Governments can be Inclusive, Equitable Workplaces

Breakout Session

During the Great Recession (or Great Shakeup), many transportation experts have reconsidered their current roles and employers and made a change. In this session, we'll examine the challenges governments faced during the pandemic and what tactical changes we can focus on

Whose Lane is it Anyway? Creating Safe Streets for Bikes and Buses

Breakout Session

Complete streets don’t stop at the curb-- or the bus stop. Balancing safe bus and bike operations in a constrained right-of-way is tricky and often requires sharing space. Hear from several cities and transit agencies integrating bikeways into their bus stop

Beyond the Book: Making the MUTCD & State Design Standards Work for You

Breakout Session

If you're tired of hearing 'N-O' because of the 'M-U-T-C-D', join us for this masterclass on how to make the MUTCD and state design standards work for you - and when to build beyond the book. In

"Going to the Capitol": CA Cities Collaborating to Influence State Policy Outcomes

Breakout Session

When California's big city departments of transportation realized their voice was missing from key state policy debates, they took action. Inspired by the NACTO model, the state's eight largest DOTs joined forces as the California City Transportation Initiative (CaCTI) to

Procurement, Contracts, Pilots! Balancing equity, safety, innovation, and efficacy

Breakout Session

From the moment the first transportation network company hit the streets in 2009, cities have had to contend with, accommodate, and partner with the private sector to advance transportation options in cities. Over a decade later, staff inboxes are full

Walkshop: The Silver Line - A decade ago, today, and a decade ahead

Walkshop

Walkshop: Neponset River Greenway

Walkshop

Join this Walkshop to walk  one of Boston’s premiere shared-use walking and cycling paths that unites the diverse neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park. The ride will also explore beautiful wetlands, parks, and bridges. The Neponset River Greenway connects a

Walkshop: Regional Bus Infrastructure

Walkshop

In the past six years, the Boston region has gone from having about two miles of bus lanes to over 25 miles. These changes have transformed how the public engages with the bus system. On this Walkshop, we'll tour many

Walkshop: Neighborways: Somerville’s Back-Streets Mobility Strategy

Walkshop

Somerville began reclaiming its residential streets for neighbors and family bicycling routes with low-cost, temporary interventions. On this bike tour, learn how art empowered residents to get involved in the process, and how the treatments influenced future designs that guide

Walkshop: Cycling Ahead of Her Time: Kittie Knox and Historic Cycling in Boston and Cambridge

Walkshop

On this bicycle tour, we'll learn about Kittie Knox, a biracial female bicycling pioneer who broke down barriers during the “bicycle boom” of the late 1800s. Kittie was associated with the Riverside Cycle Club, an all-Black cycle club in Cambridge, and

Walkshop: Exploring Cambridge's Bicycle Network Vision

Walkshop

Join us on bike to learn how Cambridge’s "Bicycle Network Vision” has served as a blueprint for a system that supports people of all ages, abilities and identities. We’ll visit various parts of the network, including off-road paths, separated bicycle

Walkshop: Walking Tour of North Point

Walkshop

Located at the intersection of Somerville, Cambridge and Boston, North Point has become one of the urban core's hottest and fastest-growing neighborhoods. Originally freight yards and warehouses, the area has become a model of adaptive reuse as new high-rise residences,

Walkshop: Green Line Extension (GLX) Tour

Walkshop

Check out the Green Line Extension (GLX), the first rail addition to the MBTA system in 30 years. The project includes the construction of a new rail maintenance facility, a parallel multi-use path, and six new stations along two branches

Walkshop: Kayaking the Charles River

Walkshop

Hop into a kayak and paddle with us along the Charles River Dam. We’ll visit the Kendall Square Canal, the Longfellow Bridge rehabilitation project, the Washington Street Bridge replacement project, and the Lovejoy Wharf ferry station. Along the way, we’ll

Walkshop: A Tour of Rail Boston

Walkshop

Whether it’s the early streetcar suburbs, the presence of America’s oldest subway, or what was once the world’s busiest rail terminal, the form and structure of Boston was cemented by rail. This tour will travel through Boston’s transit history and