Complete streets

Complete streets is a transportation policy and design approach that requires streets to be planned, designed, operated and maintained to enable safe, convenient and comfortable travel and access for users of all ages and abilities regardless of their mode of transportation. Complete Streets allow for safe travel by those walking, cycling, driving automobiles, riding public transportation, or delivering goods. The term is often used by transportation advocates, urban planners, traffic and highway engineers, public health practitioners, and community members in the United States and Canada. Complete Streets are promoted as offering improved safety, health, economic, and environmental outcomes. Complete Streets emphasize the importance of safe access for all users, not just automobiles. Related concepts include living streets, Woonerf, and home zones. After World War II, many communities in the United States were designed to facilitate easy and fast access to destinations via automobile. In rural and suburban communities, people often rely on the automobile as their sole means of transportation and even in areas with public transportation and safe places to walk and bicycle, they live in a state of automobile dependence wherein automobiles are the central focus of transportation, infrastructure and land use policies to the extent that other modes of transportation, such as walking, cycling and mass transit, have become impractical. Oregon enacted the first Complete Streets-like policy in the United States in 1971, requiring that new or rebuilt roads accommodate bicycles and pedestrians, and also calling on state and local governments to fund pedestrian and bicycle facilities in the public right-of-way. Since then, 16 additional state legislatures have adopted Complete Streets laws. In 2003, Barbara McCann, who would later become the Executive Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, coordinated a search for a replacement for the term "routine accommodation.