Recognizing Excellence in Transportation Planning

This article describes a new biennial awards program that recognizes outstanding transportation planning initiatives. Created in a partnership of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and the American Planning Association (APA), the Transportation Planning Excellence Awards Program honors individuals, partnerships, communities, metropolitan planning organizations, and state and local agencies for developing and implementing innovative transportation planning programs. The author describes eleven projects that won 2004 Excellence Awards: The Low Income Flexible Transportation (LIFT) Program in the San Francisco Bay Area; Houston's (Texas) Main Street Coalition; city planning for a light-rail system in Phoenix, Arizona; the Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) in Atlanta, Georgia; the Sacramento (California) Region Blueprint, a plan to support the anticipated doubling of the population in that area; the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC, San Francisco, California) for its regional transportation plan; Lincoln City, a group of villages along an 8-mile stretch of Oregon coast, for the transformation from a state highway into a small-town Main Street in Taft, Oregon; the focus on safety in planning for southeast Michigan; pedestrian safety programs in Poughkeepsie, NY; the community-based design project for the Los Angeles (California) light rail transit; and improved consideration of transportation safety in regional planning and programming in Kansas City (Kansas). The author concludes that, as illustrated by the work of the 2004 award winners, planners and decisionmakers are increasingly called upon to make important transportation decisions in environmentally sensitive ways, using comprehensive planning processes that include the public and that consider land use, development, intermodalism, safety, and security.