{"id":4772,"date":"2015-11-24T12:21:46","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T16:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.mml.org\/wp\/inside208\/?p=4772"},"modified":"2015-11-24T12:21:46","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T16:21:46","slug":"usdot-proposes-to-remove-restrictive-design-guidelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mml.org\/inside208\/2015\/11\/24\/usdot-proposes-to-remove-restrictive-design-guidelines\/","title":{"rendered":"USDOT Proposes to Remove Restrictive Design Guidelines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) took an encouraging and surprising step, proposing to ease federally-mandated design standards on many roads, making it dramatically easier for cities and communities of all sizes to design and build complete streets that are safer for everyone.<\/p>\n<p>Currently, FHWA has a long list of design criteria that local communities and states must adhere to when building or reconstructing certain roads, unless they choose to go through an arduous process of requesting an exception to do things like line a downtown street with street trees, reduce the width of lanes to add a bike lane, or curve a street slightly to slow traffic and make it safer for people in cars and on foot.<\/p>\n<p>In this new proposed rule, FHWA decided after a thorough review to scrap 11 of 13 current design criteria for certain roads because they decided these criteria have \u201cminimal influence on the safety or operation on our urban streets\u201d and has a stronger connection for rural roads, freeways and higher speed urban arterials.<\/p>\n<p>FHWA deserves praise for their leadership on this important issue. The rule is open to public comment through December 7, 2015. Let\u2019s take the opportunity to provide public comment and thank FHWA for their leadership and make sure it is implemented to help make safer streets for all to enjoy.<\/p>\n<p>For more information <a href=\"http:\/\/t4america.org\/2015\/11\/12\/usdot-proposes-to-remove-restrictive-design-guidelines-that-make-safer-streets-more-difficult-to-build\/\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>John LaMacchia is a Legislative Associate for the League handling transportation, infrastructure, and energy issues. He can be reached at jlamacchia@mml.org or 517-908-0303.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) took an encouraging and surprising step, proposing to ease federally-mandated design standards on many roads, making it dramatically easier for cities and communities of all sizes to design and build complete streets that are safer for everyone. Currently, FHWA has a long list of design  [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":455,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legislative-link-articles","mml-onemagnify-plugin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>USDOT Proposes to Remove Restrictive Design Guidelines - Inside 208<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mml.org\/inside208\/2015\/11\/24\/usdot-proposes-to-remove-restrictive-design-guidelines\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"USDOT Proposes to Remove Restrictive Design Guidelines - Inside 208\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) took an encouraging and surprising step, proposing to ease federally-mandated design standards on many roads, making it dramatically easier for cities and communities of all sizes to design and build complete streets that are safer for everyone. 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