Eating Elephants and Herding Cats a.k.a. How to Solve Big Problems through Active Transportation

-Approaches to equitable engagement for equitable outcomes
-Use scenario approaches to make decisions about infrastructure investments
-How to measure granular evaluation metrics with data tools
-Lessons learned on tackling a large, complex, multidisciplined  planning effort

How do we address 1,500 miles of missing sidewalks? How do we spend $300+ million in bond funds? How will the pandemic change transportation? How do trails and bikeways intersect with gentrification and displacement? How do we overcome departmental silos? Can we eliminate fatalities?

Where do we start?
 
These are the questions staff in Austin’s Public Works and Transportation Departments were asking themselves in 2020. Despite years of investment, Austin is still facing a massive backlog of active transportation infrastructure (sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, bikeways, and paved urban trails) amongst rapid growth and ongoing displacement of people of color and people with low incomes. Significant amounts of funding for sidewalks, bikeways, Vision Zero, urban trails, anti-displacement were available, but these were each the domain of separate programs split across multiple city departments. While having $300+ million in funding is a nice problem to have, figuring out how to meet immediate and short-term needs with limited staffing resources is a problem faced in many cities.

For Austin, the answer was ATX Walk Bike Roll: a coordinated effort to simultaneously update Austin’s three active transportation plans—Sidewalks, Crossings, and Shared Streets Plan; Urban Trails Plan; and Bicycle Plan—to create increased alignment and synthesis to work toward shared goals.  
In this session, members of the project team will talk about lessons learned and key strategies they used to break down this complex challenge into manageable components. Many aspects of these strategies can be applied in other settings.
•Equity Framework: The planning profession has a long history of perpetuating or exacerbating inequity in communities. This session will look at how Austin centered racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity through an equity framework that guides outreach, planning, and ongoing implementation. The team will talk about how the framework was developed, how it shaped outreach efforts including hiring community members to serve as Plan Ambassadors, and how it will continue to shape decisions. 
•Scenarios: Scenarios were used in multiple ways to communicate with the public and generate constructive input that shaped the direction of each plan. One set of scenarios modeled different mixes of sidewalks and shared streets. Another evaluated how various combinations of prioritization criteria identified different priority projects to build first. 
•Evaluation Measures: During this project, the team created innovative tools for measuring network coverage and evaluating how well sidewalk, trail, and bikeway systems provide access to key destination types, down to the parcel level. These measures were used to evaluate the benefit of each scenario, including comparing benefits to equity priority areas, and can be used for ongoing tracking of progress. 

The session will include brief presentations on these strategies, a discussion of key lessons learned, and will reserve ample time for audience participation.