Strengthening Transit Through Community Partnerships
The Center for Neighborhood Technology, a local community planning think tank, said that municipalities and public agencies are failing to follow their own plans. They’re investing public funds for the region in economic development and transportation projects in undeveloped areas or away from train stations.
CNT wrote in their new report, “Putting Places First,” that money is instead spent on repaving or enlarging roads, and projects that a municipality may already be comfortable building, even if that’s contrary to their adopted plan. The report said that the mindset about how we implement projects needs to change: “even though stakeholders increasingly agree about the need to stop sprawl, and communities make plans for more compact growth, implementation crawls.”
“We have plans in place, hundreds of them, that demonstrate local support to grow more compactly, near transit, and in line with GO TO 2040,” said Kyle Smith, a planner at CNT and who wrote the report. “But we’re not promising communities the resources they need to implement these plans.”