The growing focus on context sensitive solutions and design in roadway planning, increased support for addressing public health objectives through transportation and land use planning, and concerns about oil dependence and global warming all point to a need for planning practitioners to have more knowledge and skills related to pedestrian and bicycle planning. At the same time, the amount of funding going toward pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure has increased significantly since the early 1990s with the passage of ISTEA.
Within this context, more and more communities are realizing the need for comprehensive pedestrian and bicycle master plans that provide a blue print to increase the safety and mode share for pedestrian and bicycle travel through infrastructure, education and encouragement. This has created a demand for skilled professionals to develop and implement pedestrian and bicycle master plans across the country. However, most planners receive little or no exposure to bicycle and pedestrian transportation topics in undergraduate or graduate education and thus do not possess the knowledge or skills to create these plans.
While there is a growing body of academic literature around bicycle and pedestrian transportation, there is a lack of existing resources to guide practitioners in developing pedestrian and bicycle master plans. This project will fill this need by creating a one-day workshop and detailed handbook that provides a comprehensive training for local government planners and engineers that will give them to tools and knowledge to produce pedestrian and bicycle master plans for their communities. The training will include a detailed handbook that can be used for reference after the training takes places, as well as a guide for practitioners who do not participate in the workshop. In addition, the hand book will provide a valuable text for university faculty who are integrating bicycle and pedestrian topics into engineering and planning courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
