United States
Transportation planning in the United States is in the midst of a shift similar to that taking place in the United Kingdom, away from the singular goal of moving vehicular traffic and towards an approach that takes into consideration the communities and lands through which streets, roads, and highways pass ("the context"). More so, it places a greater emphasis on passenger rail networks, which had been neglected until recently. This new approach, known as Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS), seeks to balance the need to move people efficiently and safely with other desirable outcomes, including historic preservation, environmental sustainability, and the creation of vital public spaces.
The initial guiding principles of CSS came out of the 1998 "Thinking Beyond the Pavement" conference as a means to describe and foster transportation projects that preserve and enhance the natural and built environments, as well as the economic and social assets of the neighborhoods they pass through. CSS principles have since been adopted as guidelines for highway design in federal legislation. Also, in 2003, the Federal Highway Administration announced that under one of its three Vital Few Objectives (Environmental Stewardship and Streamlining) they set the target of achieving CSS integration within all state Departments of Transportation by September 2007. The recent pushes for advancing transportation planning has led to the development of a professional certification program, the Professional Transportation Planner, to be launched in 2007.
In recent years, there has been a movement to provide "complete" transportation corridors under the "complete streets" movement. In response to auto-centric design of transportation networks, complete streets encompass all users and modes of transportation in a more equitable manner. The complete streets movement entails many of the CSS principles as well as pedestrian, bicycle and older adult movements to improve transportation in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Transportation Planning
Famous quotes related to united states:
“What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I incline to think that the people will not now sustain the policy of upholding a State Government against a rival government, by the use of the forces of the United States. If this leads to the overthrow of the de jure government in a State, the de facto government must be recognized.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The recognition of Russia on November 16, 1933, started forces which were to have considerable influence in the attempt to collectivize the United States.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)