Officials from opposite coasts present innovative long-range transportation planning efforts to make their cities more active, more connected, and more engaged.
Go Boston 2030
What happens when you design a transportation planning process from the ground up? How do you write a citywide plan that captures the people’s voice? Go Boston 2030 set out to develop a bold citywide mobility plan through an innovative and inclusive public engagement process. Go Boston 2030’s Vision Framework report, to be published at the end of this summer, will include goals and targets that will guide the collection and prioritization of projects and polices for the final Action Plan. The content of the report is being developed out of a grassroots public engagement process that included a Question Campaign, which collected 5,000 questions about getting around Boston in the future; a Question Review session where community leaders and city officials selected the priority questions from each of 12 themes to frame the public dialogue; and a two-day Visioning Lab that attracted over 600 people who read and commented on the priority questions, vision ideas, and transportation data.
Move Seattle
In a city known for its proliferation of process, what happens when you turn that process on its side and use years of previous work and outreach to develop a big picture approach to transportation planning? Turns out, you get a great product called Move Seattle, a 10-year strategic vision for transportation. Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) was tasked with creating a compelling communications piece that lays out Seattle’s challenges as a rapidly growing city, integrates existing long-range plans, prioritizes projects, and identifies concrete near-term actions. In the end, SDOT came up with a list of transformational projects (17 over the next 10 years) and over 75 near-term actions to move towards the goal of a transportation system that is safe, affordable, interconnected, vibrant, and innovative for all. Building on years of community input and extensive engagement efforts, SDOT developed the content for Move Seattle in-house. Through multiple iterations and the wizardry of graphic design, the result is an end product that is clean, compelling, and drives the work SDOT does daily.